Middle-aged women are broad. They spread, like skies—
Some like cumulus, low down and bustling even when the earth grips them, holding them stationary, their roiling face confined to the valley of their birth. Some high like cirrus, a physical thinness so far away, aloof, that they can communicate broadness only through impression and intuition until you fly up into them and find that the many hours it takes to cross their expanse will force you to admit it. Some again like rain, the impression of a single momentary reality no wider to my eye than the next droplet, a narrow thought so at odds with their peers until you meet them again in Tangiers, Mumbai, Puerto Vallarta, and they are themselves the same, drop to drop, a narrow self welcome broadly to the whole earth the same. And some, like my mother, are an infinite expanse of cloudless sky unknowing of the passage of time but for the cruel eye of the eternal-burning sun scorching its way through their open spaces, orienting, marking time, an unforgettable reminder of exactly what it is and has always been and always will be, a violence to the self unwelcomed (but somehow you look at it and the miracle is that you cannot, will not, have never marked it's track because the broadness of her is that most miraculous substance—air—in which no outsider can leave its mark, only stay for its time, and, when the sun has passed and and the winds have blown and the trees have heaved their daily stuff, go again, her self become crystalline, the stars to show).
