For An Everlasting Bouquet

I enjoyed the following passage in a book I’m reading as I approach my fifty-seventh birthday this week.   This says it all far better than I could!

“My dear Mrs. Ali, I would hardly refer to you as old, ” he said.  “You are in what I would call the very prime flowering of mature womanhood.”  It was a little grandiose but he hoped to surprise a blush.  Instead she laughed out loud at him. 

“I have never heard anyone try to trowel such a thick layer of flattery on the wrinkles and fat deposits of advanced middle age, Major,”  she said.  “I am fifty-eight years old and I think I have slipped beyond flowering.  I can only hope now to dry out into one of those everlasting bouquets.”

from Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonsen