““Old age can be a deceiver. My knees ache when I walk, but if I sit still, I do not feel so different from the girl I was. I tell myself I am the same. Then I glance down at my hands resting on the saffron folds of my stola, and I see blue veins under skin that is almost translucent. I cannot evade physical reality. And yet I believe I remain, in some essential way, the person I was at fifteen or twenty.””
