What to make of a diminished thing

Margie: I see now, aging demands creativity, maybe more than any other time of life. You have to figure out what to do with yourself. You have no job, and nobody expects anything of you, so you’re on your own. You have to make it all up, but your energy is less, your brain can hold less. Everything is diminished.

I said that reminded me of a Robert Frost sonnet, The Oven Bird. I searched for it on my phone and read it aloud to Margie. The last four lines are,

The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

She clapped her hands with pleasure. 

Margie: What to make of a diminished thing! That’s it. That’s the question. I thought I invented it. But having it in a poem is sort of…what’s the word? Comforting. Right now, I’m the oldest person I know. But others have been old before me, and they felt this way too.

I sent it to her as a text message so she can read it again if she wants, and then we looked up the oven bird on Youtube and listened to its song that isn’t a song. 

I took with me the book I bought with the money she gave me for my birthday, Women Photographers from Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman, edited by Boris Friedewald (2018). We looked at it together, and she loved the sepia-toned portraits of Trude Fleischmann. She asked if I could make one like that.