Catherine Drea: Welcoming autumn and ageing

While it wasn’t the best year for blackberries, it was a wonderful year for apples and although the whole shebang needs far too much sugar and tons of butter, I can’t resist making crumbles and apple cakes. 

As I piled thick creamy yoghurt on top of an oatmeal apple crumble, I was reminded of how my Nanan used to say that a little of what you fancy does you good. I fancy big bowls of apples and blackberries, especially fresh off the hedgerows in autumn.

It’s that time of the year, as old as forever, when our foraging and harvesting instincts are triggered. Last night was the Autumn Equinox, when day and night are of equal hours. They say that it’s a time of balance and transition from one season to another as our little planet heads out away from the sun and towards our winter.

It’s fairly recently that I realised that the Earth tilting away from the sun is what gives us our seasons and our light. When I used to look into the sky I would perceive that the sun was moving and didn’t understand that we were the ones hurtling around the sun and through space at 107,000 kilometres an hour!

Autumn is a time of change, which of course has always reminded me of our own human ageing process. The leaves drying up, wrinkling, changing colour and finally falling, isn’t that the very same for all of us mere mortals?

Already the light is more golden and the shadows on the ground are lengthening. I noticed this today as it was yet another incredible sunny September day. More like summer except for the sense I have that the light is fading.

We are all fading too! It’s important to get a bit of a perspective on that. I love to think of my departed elders and how they managed getting older. Well to be fair it never really crossed my mind that they were older. They were just there. Full of life, insights, playfulness and fun.

My Mother’s Mother was known to us all as Nanan. After a few years working in Hearne’s Drapery on the Quay she returned to the midlands and opened her own hat and gloves shop. Always the entrepreneur she then turned her premises into a restaurant where she worked until the day she died. Going upstairs for her usual afternoon nap, she failed to return to her post after dying in her sleep. She was 93.

What always inspired me about her was that I would look into her wrinkly, smiley face and see the love, and the mischief. In a way it was like looking into the face of a child. She was eternally beautiful. Her black garb, worn since 1954 after the death of her Mother, and her silver hairnetted hair, all made her incredibly elegant and a model of a powerful and brilliant woman.

So it is with great sadness that I see more and more young women fearing getting older and so many older women worrying so much about their appearance. I doubt that my Nanan ever gave it a thought.

If anything she played up the “Grand Dame” role and eventually became known locally as the Duchess. But the part I will always remember and treasure was the full immersion in being old, wrinkly and content with life.

In this time of transition and reflection, it’s worth looking to see the beauty in change, age and death in nature. It’s a cycle that goes on in spite of everything. Pruning, tending and cutting back changes nothing. Autumn comes and everything dies back until the next spring.

More than ever women and also men are coming under this weird pressure to deny their nature and their age. Very few people say to young women, it’s OK, you are perfect just as you are. Ageing is natural, beautiful and powerful. You don’t need to fix yourself!

There’s a strange phenomenon happening across the first world. Women are beginning to look like clones of each other. They call it the Mar-a-Lago face.

You know it! These women have big oversized or filled lips, sucked in cheeks and high cheek bones, scrimpy tight jawlines, arched eyebrows and smooth, frozen expressions.

The Mar a Lago face also comes with heavy spray tans, fake eyelashes, and white fake toothy smiles.There’s something sad and robotic about the results of this ham-fisted cosmetic enhancement. It’s as if women and girls can no longer be individuals with their own unique faces and bodies. Everyone must conform to the so-called “best version of themselves” that money and cosmetic surgery can buy.

There's a huge difference between taking pride in your appearance, enjoying dressing up or wearing something beautiful, and this new obsession with carving up your face and body to suit some current fashion.

In time I suppose, we will look back at this strange era when some women fell prey to the idea that a frozen face would bring you happiness. Instead it might be truer to say that the fading of summer and the turning of the season would bring a body more ease and rest than any kind of new face or body.

The message in the turning of the year might be to allow the leaves to shed, to let go and get ready to turn inward. Celebrate the ancient Irish embodiment of powerful ageing, the wise older woman, the Cailleach.