It just occurred to me that soon I will be writing December 6… What a thing. Time is weird. Lately I’ve been feeling aged, and even though I’m creeping up on 61 (come late December), it feels premature, like I can’t really figure out what age I am. What would it mean, anyway, to “act” as old as I sometimes seem to myself when I’ve pulled my hair into an “old lady bun” on top of my head? It’s like that episode of Miss Marple with Joan Hickson in the starring role (“the old cockroach,” as Inspector Slack calls her), where the rich and superbly coiffed old school friend sees Jane Marple scuttle through the Bertram Hotel lobby and to the friend she’s sitting with says something like “she looks a hundred!”
Well, she sort of does. If you don’t constantly refurbish yourself – the hair, the hair… and of course the makeup (which I don’t do at all) and the clothes – you quickly look a lot older than you feel. The worst might be the “old lady bun,” my default in atrocious humid weather, to which we returned yesterday to the point of me wanting to scream.
Today it’s still terribly humid, if markedly cooler, and the clouds are thickening up as if someone threw brown cornstarch into hot water and is letting it cool now. Thunderstorms and severe weather are expected by mid-morning. Meanwhile, Hurricane Irma is bearing down on the Caribbean. I wonder if it will come up our way and what it will look like when or if it does.