Memorial Day in Manhattan Alice Neel Last weekend I traveled to New York City to take in art and New York’s scenic walks. The weekend’s pounding rain curtailed some of my plans, but my mission to see the Alice Neel Exhibit at the Met was not thwarted by the rain. Below is the painting, “Marxist Girl,” from 1972. Neel, a life long [...]
Pat Taub
GUEST POST by PAMELA VALOIS I met Jacomena Maybeck when I was thirty-seven and she was in her late seventies. She was tarring her roof, dressed in a halter top and shorts. I’d never met anyone like her. Our long friendship would help prepare me for my own winter years that I now find myself in, at age seventy-seven. In her memoir, Jacomena [...]
Pat Taub
Mother’s Day is right around the corner, and while it’s a joyful time to honor mothers, it can also be an unsettling occasion for those adult daughters with a pronounced mother wound. The holiday can reawaken a daughter’s memories of the maternal hurt she experienced growing up and which continues to affect her primary relationships. [...]
Pat Taub
Who’s the older woman warrior? She’s the older woman, who believes in doing her part to make her community and the world a kinder, more just place. She cares deeply about the planet her children and grandchildren will inherit. She’s not afraid to stick her neck out. She figures she doesn’t have much to lose given her advanced age. [...]
Pat Taub
Spring’s arrival, with its warming temperatures, is perfectly timed with the gradual re-opening of our country. Many of us have now received both vaccination shots, allowing us to step into the outside world to make travel plans, tentatively dine indoors and exchange hugs with reunited loved ones. While initially the lockdown was a big jolt [...]
Pat Taub
If you need inspiration and reassurance that old age is still a dynamic time and not a passage to be feared, then grab Diana Athill’s two memoirs. The first, Somewhere Towards the End, was written when she was 89. Her memoir, Alive, Alive Oh! was published when Athill was 98, three years before her death at 101 when she was working on [...]
Pat Taub
“My mission is to create a radical empathy for the older body. I want to expand our understanding of beauty and sensuality, which is not confined to the young.” Jocelyn Lee’s new photography book, Sovereign, is the book older women have been waiting for: a book filled with photographs of nude aging women, proudly facing the camera [...]
Pat Taub
Lisa Montgomery A story that got lost in last week’s horrific storming of the capital is that of Lisa Montgomery, the first woman prisoner executed since 1952. Montgomery was imprisoned for a horrific murder that has been attributed to the extreme sexual and physical abuse she endured growing up. Serendipitously, I had just finished the [...]
Pat Taub
GUEST POST by CAROLE LESKIN This is how I imagined it. Once Upon a Time, long, long ago, there was nothing but Darkness. A color so black it has never been seen again. And there was silence. It had been that way forever. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, millions of tiny lights, brighter than the brightest diamonds appeared. They danced in the [...]
Pat Taub
Covid Thanksgiving I surprised myself by adapting to my orphaned Thanksgiving better than I had anticipated. Even though I wasn’t cooking a big turkey dinner as I have on previous years, I decided to scale-back and cook for myself as if I were my own guest. I made a turkey breast, stuffing, cranberry sauce and asparagus, topped off with [...]
Pat Taub