peevish mama

Minnesota winters are nothing if not body-annihilating. Who remembers that all those parts below the neck even exist after months upon months of bitter cold? These days my body is just something I skitter around in, crouched against the slashing wind, turned in on myself like a fetus. I am as modest as a nun, cloaked in wool, denim and goose down, murmuring whispered prayers for summer, for warmth. Only yoga and sex remind me that hey, the body – it’s not nothing. 

So a trip to Florida at the apex of this cruelest of winters is a bit jarring to someone of my delicate sensibilities to say the least.  Suddenly, there I am in a bathing suit again, my long forgotten toes pale, squinting and disoriented from the shock of being freed from their SmartWool sock prison. I settle into a lounge chair and stare down my femurs. Hello legs. Long time no see. Mmmm. Sun on skin. No words.

Sunny Florida. But where there is sun, there are old people. Old people in bathing suits.  And in my state of mild body shock, I stare in horror from behind my sunglasses at the parade of fleshly decay and decomposition shuffling around in front of me. All manner of withering appendages and muscular atrophy, spinal curvature and bowleggedness, skin taught and shiny over healed incisions, varicosities branching over the backs of legs like ant trails, skin mottled with liver spots, sun spots, age spots, and flesh – dry and sagging or plump and cellulitic – like topographical maps of difficult and foreboding terrain.  Knuckles and ankles swell, nails thicken and yellow, shoulders yearn to touch each other. The ravages of time. 

It is no small mercy that, for the most part, we do not see ourselves as we walk through this world. 

We are not our bodies. We feel like teenagers and yet the mirror tells us otherwise. But watching all these dear old people floating on noodles and moving their legs in the water, creakily bending over to remove white tennis shoes after walks on the beach, leaning on shopping carts picking precious few items off the shelves, sleeping in the sun with hats or yellowed paperbacks over their faces, I can’t help but think: we are not our bodies – but what are we if NOT our bodies? 

Until such time as I evolve way past where I am right now spiritually, I am struck to the core by how very tethered we are to our bodies. It feels painful and unfair. This is what we’ve got. When this is gone, so will we be. What choice do we have then, but to be kind to our bodies, enjoy them, and hope that they won’t betray us too soon?

When I’m old I will read books constantly. Sometimes I will reread books from my teens, my twenties, my thirties. Suspended in story, wrapped in words, I will find escape from my old age. I will walk and swim as much as possible – hopefully do some yoga. I will talk to anyone who will talk to me. Maybe I’ll get a little dog. I will eat olives and ice cream and ridiculously marbled steaks and fries dipped in mayonnaise and watermelon. I will drink loads of white wine – sometimes gin and tonics if I’m in the mood for a good laugh or a good cry.  

But mostly, I will lounge in the sun. Sun on skin. Warm bones. I will bake my old body in the sun because I won’t care about wrinkles anymore.

And my skin will get as brown as bark.