Aging

Yup, it's something we all do, and it's the one thing I can say with certainty that I never procrastinate on. I do a little every day so it's not such a shock at the next marker. And so the latest one passed quite gracefully. Mostly. And if you're wondering, I've never really kept it a secret. I marked a quarter century shortly after our wedding, and we recently marked a decade of marriage, so if you do the math, that makes me thirty-five.
As it happened, the Bear was out of town on my birthday, but he left a day later than planned so he could take me for a nice dinner first. I spent a good part of the actual day packing, doing laundry and sorting papers to be dropped off to the bookkeeper before I left to join the Bear. I then got birthday greetings all the way up the line, starting with a night at my mom's, a morning stop at my sister's, a visit with our old friends in K-town, and a late birthday cake when I caught up to the Bear at my in-laws. And LOTS of strawberries at every stop, which I've always associated with good birthdays.
Like most things these days, though, my perspective is a little different. I don't feel old at all, but perhaps I'm conscious of being not quite so young. And when I think about being thirty-five, I think about when I started to be aware of my own mother's birthdays and her age. It was her mid-thirties. (Oddly, I don't have nearly such clear memories of my dad aging, though he was born in the same year as my mom). By the time Tweetie reaches that point, I'll be into that next decade. The number doesn't really matter much, but I'm gonna have to work a little harder at keeping myself in good shape to keep up with her. And I do feel like lately I've wanted to work a little harder at procrastinating. Or at least being a bit less effective. I can't stop the clock, but I can limit what I let it tell me.
Here's to living fully to as many more birthdays as I'm granted.