This face that is battered by weather and wrinkled beyond recognition is my own. In my mind's eye it is youthful, the face my mother kissed so many decades ago. The mirror tells me otherwise and part of me wants to erase all those lines, wind back to clock and begin again. But there is another part that loves every crease, they are part of who I have become - no longer a girl but a mother and a grandmother. It is the face of someone who has lived, suffered, loved and grieved. I cannot be anyone else and this crumpled face is part of who I am.
The wrinkles and folds of skin were now so pronounced it was hard to tell what she must have looked like as a young woman. Perhaps she was once admired, courted and coiffured. Now she just looked like a party balloon almost bereft of it's helium, sagged and deflated. Yet once she knew you were there those eyes would light up behind the drooping eyelids and she would ask for her birthday cake. Everyday! So we kept a stash of cupcakes and candles and sang to her after her eleven o'clock tea.
Granny used to work so hard to hide her wrinkles. Her bathroom would be a dazzling display of every remedy on the market, all of them in fancy small bottles, perfumed and delicate. She kept her hair dyed black and her figure trim. But in this last decade she stopped all that. Now she lets the creases deepen and magnify unimpeded. She lets her hair grey and plays bridge instead of hiking with her dog. It's like she just decided to get old, perhaps fighting it was just too hard.
The map of wrinkles on his face told of the most incredible journey. His eye lines told of laughter, of warm smiles and affection. His forehead told of worries past and worries present. But mostly they were so deeply engrained they told or a man who had travelled through eight decades to that moment; to stand here as an old man, beaten and forlorn. To be dismissed as "old" when he was so much more than the sum of his parts.