'A vecchia

'A vecchia. Eighty-nine nearly closes the list, and it’s the old woman: not the loving grandmother — she’s at seventeen — but the old woman as a figure of time running out. The Smorfia puts her here, second to last, one step before fear: on this list, the order of the numbers is never random. In dreams, eighty-nine arrives when the end of a season is involved. Not death: things growing old, a phase drawing to a close, the realization that something won’t come back the way it was. It also brings wisdom, which in tradition is the reward for time gone by. The images that lead here are harsher than you’d expect. The old woman. Snow, which is the cold and the slowness of someone who no longer moves as before. And then the snake: in folk tradition the old woman is also a feared figure, the one who knows and who has power — a respect that resembles dread. If eighty-nine came up in your dream, time was in it. We don’t announce anything and we don’t console you: we point out that in your dream something was growing old, and that the Smorfia, unlike us, has never been embarrassed to say so.