I'm only going over home

It had been awhile since I’d been really taken aback by the fact that I am aging, and quickly at that. In college, of course, I wrote entry after melodramatic entry in my Salvador Dali themed journal about being on the "cusp of full blown adulthood" (oh mercy), but then I got settled into my role of wife, mother, inept housekeeper and no longer had hours of time on my hands to meditate of the fascinating subject of "me." Recently, however, my grandmother passed away and since then I've been finding myself dipping back into memories of childhood - recalling moments, people, sights and smells I hadn't thought about for years, and now here I am longing for them.

In the above photo, I am five-years-old and my cousin, Kelly, whose smooth and platinum hair I always envied, is standing next to me. We're in Ohio at a family gathering and I can picture pretty clearly what we probably ate, what we were playing before and after this snapshot was taken. I know that whenever we stayed with my grandparents, we loved making forts and Pepsi in bottles and individual boxes of sugar cereal with toast for breakfast. Three out of four of my kids are now older than I was then and quite frankly, that is hard for me to wrap my mind around.

I like the mid-thirties in that I finally feel truly comfortable in my own gradually wrinkling skin. But the speed with which life passes by as I get older and older still, can be unsettling. It is good though, I think, to feel death's breath as I move forward, God willing, into the second half of my existence on this earth. Or then, again, perhaps tomorrow ... well, you get the point. I need as many incentives as possible to make every single second count for more than merely "something." Stay focused.