Gracefully, Gratefully: More Poems on Aging

As soon as I posted my first collection of poems about getting older I found more and started a second list. That's life, isn't it? Just when you think you're finished with something it comes around again, kind of like birthdays.

There's accepting, and there's embracing. Most of these poems embrace the aging process and what we attain as we become elders, sages, crones. Others keep alive the hope of new love, new adventures.

"Aging"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I, too, am changing
in these long days.
I, too, am converting what I’ve known
into what I will be.
I, too, am becoming something
I almost don’t recognize—
heady with transformation,

"Credo" 
Victoria Miller

I want to be recycled endlessly, and flower again
and yet again unexpectedly, bloom into
a surprising color for an old woman, ripe
with wrinkled youth and vigorous beauty,
with twinkling eyes in deep sockets,
making them wonder
just how I do it.

"By the Numbers"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Let me grow old
on belly laughs.
Let me know my true age
in kisses. And though
it is a finite number,
let me lose count.

"I Confess"
Alison Luterman

I stalked her
in the grocery store: her crown
of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip,
her erect bearing, radiating tenderness,

"I ["No, no, there is no going back"]"
Wendell Berry

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.

"Counting Backwards"
Linda Pastan

There are places
where at 60 they start
counting backwards;
in Japan
they start again
from one.

"Still Singing" 
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

There comes a day when a woman knows
she’s more Mother Superior than Maria—

"There Is an Old Woman Inside Me" 
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I love the old woman inside me,
gnarled as the branches of an old peach tree.
She is no stranger to how the world changes.
Every day I practice to be more like her,

"The Romance of Middle Age" 
Mary Meriam

I didn’t know I’d undergo this change

and be the unseen cover of a book

whose plot, though swift, just keeps on getting thicker.

"Turning 70" 
David Allan Evans

That’s it—exactly what I need to get back to:

that letting go (minus the giddy guts), with my eyes

fiercely wide open, each day seconding Prospero’s

“be cheerful, sir,” and Lao Tzu’s tree bending

in the wind, each day looking forward to enjoying

what’s left of the ride, the carnival, the life.

"Walking a Field into Evening" 
Larry Smith

We age like trees now, watch our seedlings

take wind or grow around us.

A quotation from poet Tomas Tranströmer to wrap up this collection:

"We always feel younger than we are. I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings. The sum of them is me. The mirror sees only my latest face, while I know all my previous ones."

Reruns: June Posts Worth Revisiting

I started my reruns in August 2023, taking trips down memory lane to reread old posts and find the ones that hold up when I read them years after first writing them. This gives me some nostalgia bumps, like reflecting back on a great bike touring trip I took with my sweetie in 2018 and reading posts I wrote after moving to Seattle in 2012.

Going back to my older posts also reminds me how much I was thinking, reading, and writing about transportation well before working professionally in that realm. Starting to bike commute, creating Spokane Bikes, and participating in local transportation work groups really laid a foundation for the career path I'm now on. 

June keeps rolling from National Bike Month in May to provide plenty of inspiration for riding, if not always writing. The 2018 bike tour links below pick up where the ones in May's reruns left off.

• Yes, Even More Transportation Poems (Bike Style, June 25, 2023)
• Riding Thoughts: Privilege Is a Tailwind (Bike Style, June 19, 2023)
• Choose Your Own Adventure: Creating your Version of an Athlon (Bike Style, June 11, 2023)
• Making Soup: A Pot Full of Poems (June 10, 2023)
• Days Seven and Eight: Victoria, BC to Friday Harbor (Bike Style Life, June 1, 2018)
• Days Nine and Ten: Friday Harbor to Lopez Island (Bike Style Life, June 3, 2018)
• Day Eleven: Lopez Island, a Gentle Retreat (Bike Style Life, June 4, 2018)
• Day Twelve: Lopez Island to Anacortes (Bike Style Life, June 5, 2018)
• Day Thirteen and Done: Anacortes to Southwest Seattle (Bike Style Life, June 6, 2018)
• Bike Touring Northwest Washington State: How Our Bike + Ferry + Train Loop Worked Out (Bike Style Life, June 8, 2018)
• 14 Ideas for Seattle Area Bike Rides (Washington Bikes, June 5, 2015)
• Snohomish County Bikes: Seattle to Edmonds--Day Trip to the Salish Sea (Washington Bikes June 17, 2014)
• Great Guide to Bike Touring in Washington State: The Reviews Keep Coming (Washington Bikes June 3, 2014)
• Personal Privilege and Biking: It Takes More than a Bike Lane to Start Riding (Washington Bikes June 2, 2014) (an update of the post that appeared originally on Bike Style Life in 2012; I updated it again in 2016)
• Three Women, Three Interactions on the Road (on Bicycle Alliance of Washington June 14, 2013)
• I Suppose It Takes All Kinds: Musings on Human Behavior (Bike Style June 9, 2013)
• Take It Easy: How NOT to Increase Your Weekly Mileage (Bike Style June 3, 2013)
• 'Twas Brillig, and the Slithy Toves (June 1, 2013)
• Is There Such a Thing as a Lowercase "nazi"? (June 24, 2012)
• We Engineered Our Way into this Mess. Now We Need to Engineer Our Way Out of It. (on Bike Style June 22, 2012)
• When I Get Older: Why I Believe in a Multimodal System and Complete Streets (on Bike Style June 20, 2012)
• Who Really Pays for Streets? We All Do. (on Bike Style June 18, 2012)
• How to Be a Good Guy/Gal on the Street (on Bike Style Spokane June 15, 2012)
• Losing Weight (on Bike Style Spokane, June 26, 2011): Not fatphobic or about dieting
• The Sheer Joy of It (June 25, 2011)
• Women's Clothing for Biking that Doesn't Look like It's for Biking: What to Wear, What to Wear (on Bike Style Spokane, June 19, 2011)
• Nice Rack, Lady! (on Bike Style Spokane, June 9, 2011)
• Getting what You Want a Different Way: Can We Create New Models? (June 9, 2010)
• A Typical Week, in Outfits & Mileage (on Bike Style Spokane, June 11, 2011)
• A Little Light Reading: Yes, More on Transportation....but Really about Society and Time and Happiness and Big Stuff like That (June 16, 2010)
• Real-time Reviews of Job Applicants, or, I Can Be Brutally Honest. Just Watch. (June 11, 2010)
• Getting what You Want a Different Way: Can We Create New Models? (June 9, 2010)
• A Little Light Reading: Transportation and Health, Summer Parkways, and the Density of Smart People (June 8, 2010)
• In Defense of High School Drama (June 6, 2010)
• Public Sector Communications Job Applications 101 (June 2, 2010)

It Beats the Alternative: Poems on Growing Older

I was less conscious of my age and the aging process when I was younger. Now when I stand up I may utter a little "oof", and my ankles make a lot of crackling sounds. (Pro tip: Stand up from your sofa or chair without using your arms to push yourself up. You'll be using, and thus helping to maintain, more of your body's strength. Same goes for getting up from the toilet, for that matter.)

My parents lived into their 90s. One of my grandfathers lived to be 95; my grandmothers lived into their 80s. I feel as if I come from a long-lived line and I've had better nutrition and health care than any of them, so it's not that I'm peering into the grave. But I find that some poems resonate for me now that I imagine I wouldn't have found as relevant at 30 or 40. Some poetry can't be written until you've arrived at that place—maybe all of it! 

Most of these are specific to aging as a woman. US society, with its worship of the taut, the slender, the unattainable, begins to ignore older women unless they're famous enough to rate the cover of AARP's magazine. While freedom from the male gaze brings its own kind of relief, ageism, sexism, ableism, and all the other -isms can make for a foul brew. When someone tries to pour that into my cup, I decline. I am just as much me, myself and I at every age that lies ahead as I was in the years behind me. I have become who I am walking a path I'm still on. 

For the most part these poems celebrate, rather than mourn, the passing of the years. I'm sharing a few lines from each to invite you to explore them in full.

"At Fifty I Am Startled to Find I Am in My Splendor" 
Sandra Cisneros

Not old.
Correction, aged.
Passé? I am but vintage.

"A Face, A Cup" 
Molly Peacock

A break-up,
a mix-up, a wild mistake: these show in a face
like the hairline cracks in an ancient cup.

"At the Moment"
Joyce Sutphen

I thought about the way we’d aged,

how skin fell into wrinkles, how eyes grew
dim; then (of course) my love, I thought of you.

"Days I Delighted in Everything"
Hilda Raz

because surely there was a passage of life where I thought
“These days I delight in everything,” right there in the
present, because they almost all feel like that now,
memory having markered only the outline while evaporating
the inner anxieties of earlier times.

"Senior Discount"
Ali Liebegott

I want to grow old with you.
Old, old.

So old we pad through the supermarket
using the shopping cart as a cane that steadies us.

"Here"
Grace Paley

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

"Doing Water Aerobics in the Senior Living Community with Janie Bird"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

frisky as ducklings, tender as saplings
inside old trunks, joyful
as old women who remember
how good it feels to be buoyant
as geese, resilient as ourselves.

"Hear the Water's Music"
Tere Sievers

There is only one way, aging beauties,
to go down this river,
to hear the water's music over the rocks,

"Midlife"
Julie Cadwallader-Staub

to see
a bend in the river up ahead
and still
say
yes.

"Turning 70"
David Allan Evans

...with my eyes
fiercely wide open, each day seconding Prospero’s
“be cheerful, sir,” and Lao Tzu’s tree bending
in the wind, 

"Starfish"
Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee.

"We Are a River"
William Martin, based on Lao Tzu

Don't accept the modern myths of aging.
You are not declining.
You are not fading away into uselessness.
You are a sage,
a river at its deepest
and most nourishing.

"Still Learning"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

It doesn’t occur to me
to tell her about what will happen.
I flit by as she stays on the wall.
She’ll learn soon enough.

Tab Set: What I'm Reading

When I'm online I make heavy use of the CTRL-Click feature. If you hold the CTRL key when you click on a link, that link opens in its own tab rather than taking you away from the page you're on. This inevitably means that in any given day I spawn a lot of open tabs of articles I mean to get around to reading.

Given my varied interests and the kinds of things my friends and other contacts share in social media, that leaves me with quite the eclectic mix. I share today's tabs in hopes that you'll find something to amuse, stimulate, or inspire in some way.

• How to Make Your Own Laundry Detergent: I've been meaning to do this for years. In fact, I bought the ingredients in Spokane before we moved--18 months ago. So it's high time and the fact that we're almost out of laundry detergent prompted me to go look this up. Did you know that gallon for gallon, liquid detergent costs more than gasoline? I'm on it.
• Everyday Rider: Riding Out Your Period: On the Bicycling Magazine blog by my friend Elly Blue.
• You're Not as Visible On a Bike at Night as You Think, New Study Shows: From BikePortland, a piece I looked up to share with Elly (although she lives there so I imagine she's seen it) for a discussion on Facebook about things she could write about in her column for Bicycling.
• The Anthropology of Walking: Has me thinking about how my bike-riding patterns might fit into the findings of a study of foragers and reflecting on my reading of Born to Run by Christopher McDougall.
• This Is Love: A very sweet cartoon strip on overcoming hurts to your heart and loving again, which someone shared on Facebook and I reshared. This illustrates what my Sweet Hubs did for me.
• Which Musical Should You Star In? I don't take every quiz that crosses my path, but with Second Daughter now a sophomore majoring in musical theater I had to take this one. ("Rent," for the record. Also, if I were a Star Wars character I'd be Yoda, and I scored 87 out of 100 on "Are You a Millennial?")
• Tsunami House by Designs Northwest Architects Stands Strong in the Face of Tidal Waves: I'd move into this gorgeous Camano Island house in a heartbeat--never mind the tsunamis. Sweet Hubs and I have agreed that we like a bit of the industrial (despite the fact that I've picked older/historic houses for the last two purchased) and want a certain Zen minimalism when we finally settle somewhere other than a rental. Since moving to Seattle we've lived in downtown and in Northeast Seattle and I'd like to check out more neighborhoods before deciding.
• The Nonprofit Weekly Roundup: Secrets, Emals, and Tips for Better Donor Retention in 2014: I work at a nonprofit. 'Nuff said.
• The Role of Brand in the Nonprofit Sector: Since we changed our name November 2013 to Washington Bikes (formerly Bicycle Alliance of Washington) I think about this a lot. This piece from the Stanford Social Innovation Review popped up in social media somewhere.
• Demystifying Scaling, Part I: Another piece from the Stanford Social Innovation Review I'm reading because as a statewide organization with a small staff, Washington Bikes has to be smart in how we scale our work for maximum impact and effectiveness. We'll be adding a new staff position in Spokane soon (geographical scaling) and are exploring some technology innovations that could help us reach more people.

That should represent sufficient randomness. And now, off to ride my bike. The sun is shining and the birds at the feeders look pretty happy.

16 Posts on Bike Style

I haven't stopped blogging here completely, mind you, but am producing at least two posts a week on my newish blog, Bike Style Spokane. If that's the content that interests you, pop over and subscribe!

I'd especially appreciate it if you would go vote on the Bikespedition #1 poll for great destination neighborhoods for biking/eating/shopping/sightseeing and nominate biking women to interview for "On a Roll With...."

This blog remains as the home for my thoughts on public policy (including bike policy), food, Spokane, random parenting (can't call it drive-by parenting since I'm usually on a bike), and the like.

Herewith, a round-up of my posts since the inauguration of Bike Style Spokane on May 1, 2011, the beginning of Spokane Bicycle Month:

• A Typical Week, in Outfits & Mileage (on Bike Style Spokane June 11, 2011)
• Nice Rack, Lady! (on Bike Style Spokane June 9, 2011)
• Time to Embark! Whither Bikespedition #1? (on Bike Style Spokane June 4, 2011) [come vote on the poll!]
• Sure Footing: The Blogspedition Goes Shoe Shopping (on Bike Style Spokane May 28, 2011)
• SO Fun--Last Saturday's Shopping Event (on Bike Style Spokane May 26, 2011)
• Sisterhood Rocks! (on Bike Style Spokane May 19, 2011)
• The Search for the Perfect Purse: It May Just be a Bike Bag (on Bike Style Spokane May 17, 2011)
• Bike Style Spokane Treats and Shopping! May 21 Event (on Bike Style Spokane May 13, 2011)
• It's Snot Pretty (on Bike Style Spokane May 11, 2011)
• Bustin' the Style Boundaries, Believe It or Not (on Bike Style Spokane May 8, 2011)
• Why We Need Each Other (on Bike Style Spokane May 6, 2011)
• Riding in Skirts: Today's Reactions (on Bike Style Spokane May 5, 2011)
• What the Heck Is a Blogspedition? (on Bike Style Spokane May 2, 2011)
• Bikespeditions (on Bike Style Spokane May 1, 2011)
• On a Roll With... (on Bike Style Spokane May 1, 2011) [come nominate great women I should profile!]
• Bike Style=Active Style=Spokane Style (on Bike Style Spokane May 1, 2011)

What Do Women Bike Bloggers Have to Say? The Search Engine

I've been compiling a list of bike blogs written by women similar to the Spokane blogs list I put together a while back.

I'm setting up feeds to post links from these blogs to the Twitter account @womenbikeblogs and to the Facebook page (which you can give a big ol' thumbs-up right here).

I thought a custom search engine would provide a cool tool. Et voila, thanks to Google Custom Search here it is. I'll replicate this over on my bike blog, Bike Style, with a bigger set of blogs--this one doesn't search everything I've found but I didn't want to take the page down.

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