Erosion

"Adults had a drink, they said, to take the edge off, so that's how she came to understand growing up: erosion. She was all edges, on tender hooks, which is what she thought the expression was."

---Beth Ann Fennelly, excerpt from the poem "Waiting for the Heart to Moderate" in Tender Hooks

Sagging jaw-lines, drooping breasts and stomachs and behinds, fuzzy thinking, and enervated tempers---aging is the process whereby the sharpness, tautness, firmness, elasticity, flexibility and endurance of youth give way to softening edges of all sorts.  Ironically, we seek one anaesthetic or another to bring us comfort, to soften us further, to numb us to the sharpness we perceive in our environment.  However, Fennelly is wise enough to know that we lay down new sediment in addition to eroding. Aging isn't entirely a disappearing act.