Not My Hand

I looked down at my hand today and I saw it. Really saw it. It's not the hand I remember having. Suddenly there are lines and wrinkles and freckles. They can't be age spots; they have to be freckles. It isn't my hand but I did recognize it; it is my mother's hand.

The shock spiraled me into a memory from my twenties. In a creative writing class I took in college, the instructor was encouraging us to write and never stop. He told a story about an elderly women who took his night class and how frustrated he was with her because she had waited too late to start writing. He encouraged her to quit because developing talent as a writer takes time she didn't have and memory skills she had already lost.

I remember thinking that would never be me.

And now here I am getting old and feeling it's too late to be a writer.

When I took that class, I thought the instructor was an idiot. Words and ideas gushed from me at that age and I couldn't imagine ever losing that. Now, I think he might have been right. Writing is hard work now. Words and ideas merely trickle.

Is there a point in life when you are just too old to write? Or, like everything else with age, it just gets harder to do, but not impossible?