First things first: Thank you all for commenting on my last post. It's wonderful to see you all come out of the woodwork! The winner of Amy Chaplin's At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen: Celebrating the Art of Eating Well is "eb" (Elisabeth Bentz). Congratulations! Please send your mailing address to me at gluttonforlife at gmail dot com. I can't wait for you to start cooking from this beautiful book!

With the change of season, my thoughts inevitably turn to death and dying. What? you cry. How maudlin! And I can't deny that it's with a slightly melancholy turn of mind that I watch the garden wither and decay, for this is such an evocative reminder of the passage of time. Oh, spring will come again—the rhubarb will poke its gnarled pinkness up from the cold ground and the lilacs will bloom in a purple haze—but my own spring's awakening happened long ago and my winter years are soon upon me. Reading this piece by the wonderfully wise Dani Shapiro, I was comforted to know that I am not alone in wanting to acknowledge the inevitable, and to let that open me up to appreciating the moment even more. It's so important to embrace all of life's experiences. If we bury our heads in the sand and allow ourselves to by ruled by fear, who knows what we might miss out on?
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A lot of things converged recently to inspire this post. My friend and colleague Justine Clay, a coach for creative professionals, was kind enough to feature me in her new blog series about people over fifty. I also read this article in the Times. Then I discovered this amazing project. And I had lunch with Kristin Perers, creator of this wonderful blog. I think no matter what your age, you spend some time and energy dealing with the cultural, physical and emotional repercussions of what that number signifies. Little kids are anxious for the freedom and autonomy that comes with age. Teens grapple with raging hormones and those "awkward" years. The twenties are about experimentation. In our thirties we feel pressure to settle and achieve. (Of course this is all gross generalization, but work with me.) Then things get a bit nebulous. If you have a partner, kids and a career, your forties and fifties must be about that, right? But what if you don't? And what about your sixties, seventies and eighties? Your nineties? (Too optimistic?) Who even talks about those decades? In the culture at large, there is so little conversation about what it means to be vital and creative and truly alive all the way to the end. So much of the focus, especially for women, is on how good we can look for our age. What about our accomplishments, our creativity, our grace, our strength, our sensuality, our talent, our humor?
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