Zora Neale Hurston shaved ten years off her age early in her life, at least partly because circumstances made her entry into college late and she was embarrassed to be a decade older than her freshman peers. But she was also a woman who lived in a society used to women denying their age. She got away with her lie until long after she died.

My grandmother, born in the 1800s never admitted her age—”ladies” of her day didn’t—until she reached 80 and could not help bragging about her accomplishment.

Today, age is still an issue for women, especially. I can’t pretend I get it.

In my teens, I was mistaken for a twenty-something, though I didn’t drink (okay, that one time—yuck!); in my twenties I married, but people sometimes assumed I was a teen, until I started birthing; my thirties were good, but the boys in a class I was subbing insisted I should dye my gray hair “because it makes you look old and you’re not old” and I did that for a while; my fifties were mostly about taking care of my mother, but also an MFA and empty-nesting; my sixties were about feeling my age, foot pain, and retirement; and since then the wrinkles have come and vanished any confusion about aging. I tell people I am old. The medical term for my age is “elderly,” but I don’t feel elderly. Old. Okay, old, but I can still climb to our fifth floor condo, run a couple of miles, and do math in my head. I messed up the checkbook this past month, but I also found my error. I know how to correctly use lay/lie and farther/further.

I’ve never lied about my age, and I credit Gloria Steinem. At a long-ago birthday party, someone commented that she didn’t “look her age.” She responded: “This is what 40 looks like… We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?!” She told the world that forty was strong and glamorous and powerful. I heard her when I was 22. It reset my sense of what aging means. Steinem turned 90 last year, so she’s still running ahead of me, still strong, glamorous and powerful. Still a feminist. So are we both.

Tomorrow, I’m participating in an Alumni Reading in the town where I taught high school for 29 years and subbed in the district for another 11 years before that. I’m reading from my novel, ALL THE DAUGHTERS SING, the successful culmination of many years of writing bad novels. [Okay, they weren’t all that “bad” just undone. This one is actually “done.”]

Forty-five years ago, we were the young people in our neighborhood. Now we are the old folks and as our neighbors died or moved away, and homes have become rentals. Our quiet beach is busy, and there are strangers everywhere in a place that used to be quiet and remote. The time and costs of maintaining my family’s beach home may overwhelm us in the future. We’re considering what to do about that.

My family has spent summers here since 1911. My mother, as a child road out to the coast and along the shore before the Coast Highway 101 was built, a decade before the tunnel and pavement and electricity and running water and sewers. My grandfather lived here full time in the 1940s, and Gary and I moved here in 1979 . . . most of our lives.

Gary and I went looking for another place we might age in place: nearby good medical care, no stairs, a view, walkable to groceries and other shopping, theater and live theater, no need for a car, many friends of all ages nearby.

I am very fortunate to be married to my husband all these 50 years since. We’re proud of our lives and proud of our sons, we’re still making plans, and we’re old but not done.