How to Age Disgracefully

by Clare Pooley

When you know more about someone than they know about you, it puts you in control. And it makes you safe.

Yet, here she was, utterly alone, stalking her neighbors and talking to her plants. Except for the yucca, which she’d never entirely trusted.

Most people on the site could barely spell. She’d never seen so many misuses of “their,” “there” and “they’re.”

How lovely it must be to be an age at which you wanted to add quarters rather than subtract decades.

“Lydia, you need to stop taking what irritating, self-important men tell you as the gospel truth,” said Daphne. Lydia wondered whether she was referring to the council or Jeremy. Possibly both. “You are not a doormat for them to wipe their feet on. You are a grown woman, at the height of her powers. You just need to channel them.”

Fashion isn’t frivolous, my dear. It’s armor. Dressed in Dior, you can take on the world.

“You haven’t mentioned the stealing, the deception, and my recent near-arrest,” said Art. “No. Those are the things I like about you,” said Daphne.

“Pah. I prefer my friends to have experience, wisdom, and a few guilty secrets,”

The strange thing about reaching your fifties is that, although your outsides might be gradually falling apart, on the inside you don’t feel any different from the way you did in your twenties. I still don’t feel like a “proper adult,” and I don’t expect that I will at seventy, either.