By Anna Viadero
 This is the story of me coming down in time and my body coming undone--wearing out somehow. It’s also the story of me fighting that. I run two miles now instead of six or more. Then I feel stiff as the rusted Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz. I don’t feel invigorated while I’m lifting weights in the basement of King’s Gym next to boys who could be my kids.

They have no shame. Me. Old as their mom. A 30-pound bar on my shoulders squatting with precise Romanian posture. Down. Up. Squeeze at the top.
   
Them. Wild as wolf pups. Piling weights on the leg press machine until the bar bends at an unnatural angle. They push their legs through reps of ten; their muscles rock hard and hungry. Their conversations are about pussy.

“Hot pussy.”

“Fresh pussy.”

“That pussy!”

“You pussy!”

My age makes me invisible to them. If I were 30 years younger, even 20 years younger, and dressed in Lycra, this might be a very different situation.

But I wear a baby blue baseball cap, the Boston College t-shirt I spilled bleach on, usually sweat pants, though today I have on shorts and notice my thigh skin looks crepe-y. Like the wrinkly fabric crepe de chine or the crepe-y tissue paper that Martha Stewart tops gifts bags with, but that texture on my thighs is not a good thing.

Crepe-y is a word the aesthetician, who seems barely out of her teens, uses as she pat, pat, pats thick cold cream onto the dark circles under my eyes.

 “Pat, pat, pat,” she says, sweet as a bluebird. “Never pull!”

Pat, pat, pat with the ring finger she tells me, the one next to my long middle finger, which I use to flip Father Time the bird. To show her I’m listening, I nod like a toddler who has fallen and is having mommy mend a skinned knee.

“Can you get these wrinkles out from under my eyes?” I ask.

She pulls a circular magnifying lens over and peers at me serious as a sailor searching for shore.

“Crepe-y” she says. “Yes. We can work with that.”

I feel good. Much better.

“But these creases between your eyes. The “11s,” she says. “You’ll probably need filler. Call Dr. Smith downtown for a free skin consultation.”

I feel bad again. Not just rusty and achy now, but old and creased as yesterday’s news. Etched. The creases between my eyes which I didn’t really notice before now seem deep as the Grand Canyon.

I close my eyes and let the hot lavender towel bless me.

The aesthetician says she can make my skin dew-y with a hydrating mask. I nod, committing myself to topical help for the long run. This giving over, letting her and basic chemistry help, is part of the fight as I see it now.

And I will fight that fight. At this moment in time I do not possess the hard-earned charm and grace of my favorite author and so cannot ‘Maya-Angelou’ into old age. Though I suspect before she got wise as Solomon, Maya was probably as wild and defiant as I am now, here in this place in time that feels like the middle of nowhere.

The middle of nowhere is that place one step away from your center that is suddenly and unexpectedly unfamiliar. It’s a place where you think your tools—the skills you’ve gathered over time—don’t work and you panic. When you’re a mother, the middle of nowhere can be the end of the driveway the moment your last child leaves home. For any woman, the middle of nowhere can be the moment your body and time start working against you.

For me, the middle of nowhere is now with this ache in my thigh that disables my running which is my normal response to—name it: fear, frustration, worry, sorrow, pain. I need to run and now running cramps me up. All my life running has given me strength which gave me confidence that opened me to things like applying for a new job, starting my own business, dressing up sexy for me and my hubby, but now my aching, crepe-y thighs stymie me.

My plan is to stay strong, so I lift weights when I can’t run. And most days I see a beautiful woman in the mirror there, in the basement of King’s Gym. She is looking out at me from under the brim of her baseball cap. Her eyes are oceans. Her cheeks cut by time. Her thigh skin might look crepe-y but she is here again for the third time this week with a 30-pound bar on her back squatting down, pressing up, and squeezing at the top. It’s the best she can do here in the middle of nowhere while she waits for life to make sense again.

She waits the way an American in Paris waits for French to become understandable to her ears. That moment of understanding is like a key that opens a door. A new door to a new path, like the one that I must follow now. The one I actually have tools to follow, but I don’t believe it. Everything feels different so I don’t remember how capable and strong I am—body and heart and soul. I don’t remember what I’ve survived to date. How much I’ve learned. What I know.

It might sound like I’m fighting change, but I’m not. I keep moving forward and gifts show up like signposts that prove I’m headed in the right direction. My true north.

Gifts like the terrible body aches of menopause dissolving for a few moments and letting me lift or run much less painfully than before; or the friends who fill my home now that there’s room with my kids gone; or my husband whose love-blind eyes don’t see crepe-y, only sexy. Sexy and strong.

His hands trace the cut of my aching hamstring from the hollow of my knee right up to heaven. He traces in the bedroom or bath or living room or kitchen because the kids are gone and our world has opened, not closed. There’s freedom in loss and what’s happened isn’t really a loss.

It’s a relocation—I’m coming into a new country. Even the middle of nowhere is somewhere.

Anna Viadero’s essays have appeared in many anthologies including Women Runners: Stories of Transformations, I Wanna Be Sedated and My Heart’s First Steps. She lives in Montague, Massachusetts. Website: www.annaviadero.com. E-mail:aviadero@yahoo.com