These stories are about old women. I wanted to make them about old women's lives now, as they live them, and not stories about their pasts as most writers have done, but I found, as I wrote, that inevitably the past interfered, popped up, refused to be batted down, and I had to accept that the past is very much an integral part of the now for all old people. If old age is a time of re-ordering the past, often of re-understanding it, of discovery, of trying to draw a clear narrative line through it, and of finding, at last, recurring or steady themes, and of summing up - all of which it definitely is, at least, among the wise - then reflection, musing, meditating on the past is inevitable, and very much to be desired. The now, it turns out, only makes sense in terms of the past. As one's world draws in, gets smaller and smaller, the inner life grows stronger and deeper. Life becomes thought: the grave danger is letting thought become dream, illusion, delusion, hallucination. This detachment from reality happens (when, of course, it is not caused by a disease) when the old person lives alone, or sees only other, younger adults who have no respect for the aged person as a human being.