The sun is shining, but it’s still too chilly to open the windows. Outside, everything glitters with the morning’s rain, and the last trees are changing color . Leaves lie on the path, like piles of gold coins that are somehow soft to my sneakered feet. This is autumn in Bremen, in the north of Germany.

When I got here, fresh from DC, almost two weeks ago, the season seemed far advanced. I put on my gloves, my winter coat. Now I’ve taken them off again. I’ve acclimated, and the weather has helped by warming up a little.

It’s great to be home. I’ve put away my car keys from the US, and I’m ready for a new train ticket when the new month arrives. It feels good to tramp to the farmer’s market, to buy five different kinds of Swiss cheese, and to carry it all home in my backpack. My heart pumps richer blood as I climb up to our fourth-floor walk-up. At the top of all those stairs, I take a deep breath and look out over the steeply pitched red roofs, the orange trees, and the chimneys puffing smoke.

And I’m happy that Saturn has now moved into Libra, even though I know that my Saturn return is coming up. A lot of my fellow Baby Boomers have experienced their second Saturn return, and a lot of us have had a hard time with it. People take themselves more seriously at this time in their lives. Some folks are looking over their lives with a critical eye, finding fault with old choices, regretting what they’ve lost. Others are resolutely forging into the future, creating new structures for the last third of their lives.

The first Saturn return is when we grow up, at about the age of 28. We recognize that we are temporarily earth-bound and should probably make the best of it. We come to the grips with the fact that we are here to do something particular, and we make a commitment to doing it.

The second Saturn return involves both a look back and a look forward. We are not the same people we were thirty years earlier. We’re more than just the personalities that seemed to fit us back then; we’ve added nuances, contradictions, residues of humor. We say goodbye to both the fears and the responsibilities that have driven us for so long. And we construct new priorities.

For women, one of the main tasks is redefining age itself. The popular portrait of old women bears little actual resemblance to who we are. It is up to us to figure out what it means, to spread the word, to support each other.

In her eighties, writer and suffragette Florida Scott-Maxwell said: “I grow more intense as I age.” Mystery writer Dorothy Sayers said, “ An advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.” Girls are trained to be nice, and women can spend lifetimes making sure that no one is threatened by our existence. Old women are particularly invisible, considered especially harmless, and I admit I make use of this in public places. I smile beatifically, and people think, “ What a sweet old lady.”

But I know it’s a mask. What’s under that mask? Who are we now?

Saturn is the planet of the Crone, the old Wise Woman. And, at the end of October, it moved into Libra, the sign of justice, equality and balance. Libra is a moderate, polite, cooperative, and idealistic sign; it’s not generally loud or rude. But Saturn in Libra can give the resolution to speak out clearly in defense of freedom and truth. Archetypically, Saturn in Libra looks very much like the Statue of Liberty, and interestingly enough, the statue’s sculptor was born when Saturn was in this sign.

Saturn was in Libra when Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” and also when the Liberty Bell was rung in Philadelphia to announce that the Declaration of Independence was to be read.

Saturn was in Libra when the anti-slavery movement began in America, in 1688, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. It started with a formal protest by a group of Quakers. Saturn was also in Libra when Benjamin Franklin established an abolitionist movement in 1775.

Saturn was in Libra in 1834, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire. In the US at this time, a woman and three men were arrested in Virginia for teaching slaves to read.

Saturn was in Libra in 1893, when Western women cheered and threw their hats up in the air, celebrating Colorado’s achievement as the first state to grant women the right to vote. Saturn was also in Libra in 1981, when the first female Supreme Court Justice was sworn in.

Saturn was in Libra in 1894, when thousands of jobless people formed Coxey’s Army, the first significant American protest march, and walked to Washington DC.

Saturn will be in Libra from now till April 6, 2010, and then again from July 21, 2010 to October 5, 2012. So for the next three years, the Crone will be urging us towards social improvement. She doesn’t want us to take the guns off the shelves. She doesn’t want us to shed blood. She just wants us to do the right thing, and to encourage others to do it as well.

This is the time for all of us to take a stand for what’s right. And it’s especially important for the old women to be heard. The Statue of Liberty, that woman who combines the endurance of stone and the breath of idealism, lives in all of us. In that spirit, I’m sharing my Manifesto for Aging Women. Feel free to pass it along!

I’m fifty-seven. I think I know everything.

Okay. I don’t know how to fly a jet, or distill whiskey, or shoot an AK-47, or bone a duck, or perform neuro-surgery, or say “The check, please” in Italian, or distinguish between the African and the European swallow. But I have started to think that I know what I need to know.

Is this an old lady thing? As I move towards my sixties, I am amazed at the changes I feel within myself. Are they hormonal or spiritual? Are hormones just another word for the movement of the spirit? Are these the gifts given to all women as they enter the final third of their lives?

Some of the things people say about us are true.

It’s true that we forget things. We slough off the unimportant.

It’s true that our ears melt off the sharp edges of words. People have to turn and look us in the eye when they speak to us. In this way, we know when they are telling us the truth.

It’s true that we can no longer work endlessly. We have always needed rest, but before, we ignored this. Now we find balance.

It’s true that our bodies are not the same, but in some ways, they are better. We stretch, dance, walk, rise and sit with an awareness of every joint and muscle.

It’s true that some passions have receded, but they are there when we reach for them. We have come to know a thousand points of pleasure on our own skins.

It’s true that we can be obstinate and stubborn. All our years of determination are condensed into our will. Why are people surprised by the inflexible will power of old ladies?

It’s because they think our concerns are trivial.

We are concerned with living a good life, every minute that we are alive. We love, forgive and accept, when our hearts instruct us in this path. It’s not always easy, but somebody has to do it. And we are righteous and angry, when our hearts send us that way. Somebody has to do that too.

We do not see any advantage in disobeying our own hearts.

We have never been more beautiful. Or perhaps it’s only that we have never really recognized our own beauty before.

Yet we do doubt ourselves. How could we not? This is not the picture of old women that our culture has given us. Could this really be who we are?

Are we this powerful?

We claim it. We raise our fists. We say yes.

Index of Jenny Yates' Writings on Lesbian.com