Georgia Garvey

I am on a mudslide toward death.

Well, we all are, really, when you think about it, but sometimes it just seems you’re slipping down the side of the mountain faster than at other times. Like, for example, when you’re approaching a birthday that starts with a “fif” and ends with crying in the car because the clouds are moving too quickly overhead.

It’s not as silly as it sounds – though it is, admittedly, fairly silly. I had dropped off the kids at camp and was driving back to the house when I got to a stoplight. I looked up and saw shocking blue, scattered white puffballs drifting through the sky. Quickly headed our way, though, was a wall of gray, a desolate storm front that threatened to add more rain to the already prodigious amounts we’ve been seeing.

They’re moving in so fast, I thought, before we’ve even had a chance to enjoy the blue.

I haven’t been doing much enjoying at all, mostly sitting around recovering from my fourth knee surgery in the last 10 years. But I wanted a taste of summer, and instead it looked like another storm.

Time moves, without worrying about whether we’ve had a chance to appreciate the good times. It just rolls forward, like those clouds.

It doesn’t take much to remind me of our inexorable march toward oblivion, thanks to perimenopause and its resulting hormonal chicanery. When you hit a certain age, and maybe it’s a different age for everyone, you just can’t keep up with the changes. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole. The instant you find a chemical peel that works on your face, you notice the lines in your hands. You fight to lose the weight that God has seen fit to send to your stomach and then the skin that’s left behind sags in response.

Whatever you want to call it – God, death, entropy or Mother Nature – it remains undefeated.

Just ask the reflecting pool.

Folks have been having a good laugh lately about renovations to the pool near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. In the aftermath of a $10 million no-bid contract to refurbish it in “American flag blue,” the algae that had sullied the water made a quick return. Now, sheets of the new blue paint are peeling off.

The reflecting pool is more than 100 years old, and the algae isn’t a new problem. About 17 years ago, we spent three times as much to refurbish it, only for the algae to come right back. It turns out that, no matter how much hydrogen peroxide you use, you cannot stop the passage of time.

It’s a natural instinct, I suppose, to fight that decay. We are all tempted to create massive blond combovers to hide our bald spots, to sandblast the skin on our faces with harsh abrasives, trying desperately to bring out the youth we feel inside.

But underneath the wrinkles are always just more wrinkles. The bald spot just grows bigger.

We all must ask ourselves, whether we’re talking about the reflecting pool in the National Mall or the lines on our faces, how much of our time and money we’re willing to spend trying to persuade ourselves that we can defeat time.

The president is 80 years old. I am almost 50.

We are both, if we’re honest with ourselves, not overly happy about it.

But I can’t stop my body from changing. He can’t stop the algae from blooming.