A Little Dry Apple

or "The Way I Plan To Age"

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Photo by Corina Rainer on Unsplash

The last time I bothered to count them, I had four or five gray hairs on my head. This is important because until recently, I did not have gray hair. I have always been a brunette and have never colored my hair - not even as a middle schooler with Kool-Aid or a Sharpie, the way some of my friends did: white girls crouched in camp cabins, scribbling purple sharpie into the under-layers of their tousled hair which felt impossibly cool but also kind of futile.

Some of my aversion to changing my hair color is because of the way that it feels to say, “I have never dyed my hair” and have that be true - some vague personal record of Time Undyed that I’m reluctant to break; some of it is because I am not the kind of person who can be relied upon to pay for the upkeep of having colored hair and show up for her appointments on time, repeatedly; some of it is because I can never be a true redhead and that’s the only other color I’d want to be.

Until recently I never really considered how my stance might change if I began to go gray early (and four hairs is not “going gray”), but I’ve thought about it and I don’t think much has changed: I like the way my hair is, without alteration. It’s mine, familiar to me through my life. I know the way it lightens in the sun; the way I can twist the end of my braid until it is smooth as a satin cord around my finger; the way my baby hairs spring out curly and unquiet at the nape of my neck and above my ears. And sometime before Christmas I noticed a couple bright white threads gleaming like tinsel in my brown waves.

The part about this that I love best, that feels most vital? I have now been here long enough that Time is marking my birthdays by weaving threads of silver through me.

A lot of women spend a lot of money trying to cover up their grays; I am sympathetic to the impulse - I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to approach this subject. I know that sometimes we just need one thing that we can hold on to that makes us feel beautiful. God knows that as women, the pull to alter ourselves is strong. It’s a striking amount of hard work to not value ourselves (or devalue ourselves) on the basis of our looks and what they can purchase for us.

As part of an ongoing film history challenge, Andrew and I have begun to churn our way through watching each “Best Picture” Oscar Awarded film from oldest to most recent. Even back in 1929, entire plots were built around the places a beautiful face could get you, that being plain could not, as in Broadway Melody. The message we are sent loud and clear in every type of media is this: women are to do everything in their power to become (and stay) beautiful, or else. End of story. What Broadway Melody does not acknowledge is that the sister (played by Bessie Love) who did not fit the specific form of beauty the film’s male gaze preferred is still beautiful. By pitting sister against sister, the filmmakers (who were men) created an arbitrary hierarchy of good looks and spelled out this message: no matter what form your beauty takes, it will never be enough for our capricious tastes.

Actress Bessie Love in the 1920’s - she was the “not beautiful” one. Oh please.

We are not surprised by this tone - we have seen it in our own lives: possessing a specific type of physical beauty will create a space for some women that other women do not get to inhabit.

To pretend that this pressure to alter ourselves (in an effort to make things easier) does not exist would be to deny a very clear set of expectations that mankind has prescribed.

But what if we just…stopped playing? Is that even a choice? To stop playing? We were born into this game, born into this lineage of women who have feared being not-beautiful and all that relinquishing the pursuit would mean for them. Is it even possible to step away from it all and withdraw your bet? To exit the casino into dazzling noonday sun, having forgotten (or learned for the first time) there was ever such a world apart from the roulette wheel? 

This is a question I began to ask myself years ago regarding my body. My body has always been too large to fit societal standards of ideal beauty. I am curvy, luxuriously proportioned, and when my weight has fluctuated throughout the years, so has the internal suspicion that I may be - by everyone else’s standards - quite literally too much. Except that somewhere along the line (repeatedly, with intention, and still) I decided that I did not care to live my life by other peoples’ measure. That if society did not have room for all that I am composed of - the softness, the femininity, the ripeness, the much of me - then I did not have interest in asking it to measure me. And although that is a story for another time with many attendant details, it matters. It matters because the bets are off. I have won because I have decided not to play, and those who are not playing cannot lose.

When I think about aging, I think of it from the perspective of a woman who has withdrawn her bet, and I am excited. There is so much beyond the pale of, “Am I beautiful enough? Am I young enough? Am I conventional enough?”

I am delighted to let you know that the air up here, away from the crush of expectations about my appearance, is pristine. And although this is a conversation about beauty - who gets to say what it is? Who gets to say what it’s worth? - this is also a conversation about aging. The two are inextricably linked: if you are pursuing physical beauty with your entire heart and soul, you will be fleeing age with all your mind and strength. And I think most women are - fleeing, that is. The tens of millions being poured into the beauty industry tells it well.

Can I confess something else? I’m looking forward to aging.

This is not a popular stance. It is not very common to look forward to being twice, and even three times, the age I am now. I am only thirty years old, and maybe this is youthful foolishness, to not fear aging. Perhaps if I read these words over again when I am seventy-four I will think what an absolute delusional little moron I really was at thirty. 

But maybe it is not so much a delusion as an admission that I am free to enjoy every moment of my life in equal measure. That the years of my twenties are not the best years I will ever have lived, or that the way it feels to wake up in bed beside Andrew at thirty is perhaps not superior to the way it might feel to wake up next to him at fifty-three, or that a summer peach for breakfast will not be any less sensational at ninety-two than it was last July - and how deeply sensational was that?

I know the years will bring hard things along with the good. This year has brought hard things along with the good, and it is only January. I look at my face in the mirror and it is a face into which some wrinkles have already fallen. Broad, good natured ones running across my wide forehead from my unconscious habit of raising my eyebrows in all expressions, little ones at the corners of my eyes like permanent eyeliner because my eyes squint when I smile, and I am constantly smiling and have been for three decades. There are some tired lines under my eyes, from a lot of tears and frustration in past months. I gently soothe these with moisturizer and in the mornings I roll them over with a cold jade roller, not because I want them gone but because I know how they got there, and I’m sorry it’s been like that. Two vertical creases show between my eyebrows - these appear when I’m worried, I have been worried more than a little in the last few years.

It is my own, Rachel face and the look of it is as familiar to me as a slowly changing landscape. I think about how its aspect will change through time and I laugh at my chances of remaining unwrinkled. They are not good chances. My maternal grandmother had soft, powdery, crepe-paper skin that bruised easily and looked especially nice when she wore fuchsia. My paternal grandmother’s face was as tanned and creased as a piece of baking parchment. It was a comfortably ready-to-wear face, a face that didn’t scream “dry clean only!,” a face that was always thirsting for sunlight and sweating in rivulets down the crisscross terrain of her cheeks. A salted face.

I know so many incredible women. A good many of my friends are older than I: women in their forties and fifties or older. I love knowing them and being entrusted with their friendship. I love that when I need advice about a portion of life that I’m walking through - perhaps the one wrinkling me extra - these women are here with their laughter and wise hearts, their steady eyes and strong hands. I love that absolutely nothing I admire about these women is how well-preserved they look. I love that when I look at my mother I don’t see a woman in her mid-fifties, consumed with escaping that number. She is beautiful yet, and not very wrinkled, but it is her spirit and not her face that makes you hardly believe she is in her fifties. It is that she is not afraid of the half-century she has spent loving endlessly. It is that she is so full of ideas and laughter and care and interest in people that you would never in fifty more years stop to wonder how old she is. I love that the question of looking old doesn’t even come up as a topic we are remotely interested in discussing. She knows, and I know that she knows, that I am not interested in hearing about just how much she wants to look twenty-five again. She doesn’t want to look twenty-five again anyhow.

Please hear me: I am not coming for the women who choose Botox or lip fillers, the women who color their hair or decide to get cosmetic surgery. I am likewise not saying that taking good care of our bodies and our appearance is a waste of time and effort. There are artists and skilled workers in all these fields and their callings are just as important as mine as a writer and notice-r of things. But what I am saying is that the women I admire - the women I want to grow to be like if I am awarded a long life - are the women who have withdrawn their bets and do everything they do (hair color or not, cosmetic procedures or not) out of artistic expression and not adherence to the rules of a rigged carnival game. These women are graceful and striking, elegant, whimsical, poised, and comfortable by turns because and when and how they want to be. Some are friends and some are strangers. All are holy in that way that created things are, when they exist in that unselfconscious way.

I want to be like the woman sitting in front of us at a hockey game who turned around to laugh when Andrew announced the plays of the game and showed us a thin face full of vivacity and life and a thousand wrinkles in joyful places beneath bobbed, sandy hair. Her daughter, beside her, was classically beautiful and young. And I thought how nice it must be to look classically beautiful now, and also to know you had joy-lines ahead of you. To have an easy foot in both worlds. I hope she lets those joy-lines fall openly across her face when the time comes - her mother looked like someone you could have an adventure with, and not the sort who would be precious about things like her lasering appointments.

In 2019, journalist Bill Donahue wrote a captivating, heart-soaring profile on female National Geographic explorer Sarah Marquis. While the entire article is a treat and deserves your full attention, one part of the closing has lingered with me since I first read it. Heretofore in the article, Donahue has said remarkably little about Marquis’ appearance. We know she is blonde, and what she wore at their interview. That is all. His questions lie much more solidly in the range of what we really want to know more about: Marquis’s life as a female adventurer.  This badass middle-aged woman, a solo explorer of the world, is being asked by a male journalist how long she intends to keep exploring. Her answer to this question is so typically, delightfully off-center and I love it with everything in me:

“I don’t know,” Sarah says sharply. “I don’t think the way you do.” A moment later, she softens. “I’m going to be an awesome old woman,” she says. “My face will be a topo map of all the places I’ve been. I’ll be a little dry apple, but I will never get old.”

It is this spirit that I want to take with me as I age. This is the contagious bit of people who age well. This is what I mean when I say that I want to age like Julie Andrews, Drew Barrymore, Mary Oliver, Sarah Marquis, or a woman I know from my church: I don’t mind the wrinkles and the silvering hair. I don’t mind the aches and pains and shifts in the way my body works (with a chronic inflammatory condition, don’t I know a little of this at thirty, anyway?). None of the physical aspects bother me because the secret joy of all these women is this: they have aged, but they will never grow old. They will never dread being full of years.

---

So I lift my nanny kid to the countertop in her bathroom where I frequently show her her own reflection in the mirror and tell her all the ways she is lovely and beloved.

“Want to see something beautiful?” I ask.

“Okay!” At three years old, she always wants to see something beautiful.

“I have silver hair!” I shake down my brown waves and part my hair to the place on the right side of my head where a glittering, white strand gleams. I do think it’s beautiful. I know I could yank it out, but why would I? It is shining.

She stares at my hair; surprised, maybe, that we are talking about my reflection and not her own. Surprised, maybe, that I have a white hair on my otherwise dark head.

“It’s so glittery,” I tell her. “I love it. Do you like it?”

And she smiles and nods. “It’s pretty.”

She is three years old, and she doesn’t know anything about gray hair, doesn’t even know what it means to be aging, but what I hope is this: I hope one day when she notices a gray hair on her own head, that this moment is what she remembers: a countertop in a rose-colored bathroom and someone naming silver hair beautiful.

Theologians often refer to “the law of first mention” which is the concept that the very first time something is shown in Scripture is usually the clearest, simplest, most originally-intended form of said thing. I hope that this conversation about the beauty of silver hair becomes this child’s “law of first mention” about aging. I hope that, even when my time with her is finished, she will grow up knowing deep within her womanly soul that it is possible to age without ever becoming old. That age is a privilege, not a fearful thing. That the wrinkled women, the soft, sagging, parchment-skinned, lived-in, loved-up, sun-facing women all around her are as much alive and full of value as they’ve ever been. That they are not worth less because their bodies show that they have lived here on this planet a rich, long time.

I am alive today, hopefully only a third of the way through the years I will enjoy. I have four or five silver hairs on my head (I don’t plan to count them again). I am pleased with the ways Time has decided to mark me, the glitter on my head bearing witness to the fact that I’m here for another day, and possibly until I’m one hundred. None of them are promised to me, these days that are very, very slowly turning me into a little dry apple - but never old! - and I want to live them with appetite. It’s the least I can do for the magical fact that I am here in this body, existing like this in a world that is so full of wonderful, knowable things.

The witchery of living

is my whole conversation

with you, my darlings.

All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.

This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.

It’s more delicate than the wrist with its personal pulse.

It’s more than the beating of the single heart.

It’s praising.

It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.

You have a life - just imagine that!

You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe

still another.

- part 3, “To Begin With, Sweet Grass” by Mary Oliver