Turning 27 and Other Birthday Related Thoughts

I can't believe it's almost my birthday. The older I get, the more time flies. I never believed adults when they said this to me as a child. Time used to last forever then. I remember how long summers used to seem. It was as if the days would never end and I remember summers as a blur of warm sunshine and green grass. The kiddie pools we always had with the inevitable bit of grass floating in them. We used to hang almost all of our clothes on the line outside in the summer and I remember the smell, like sunshine had soaked into the material and had become a scent. Mom often let us hang a sheet on the line and use it as our tent. It was wonderful since it provided shade from the sun and also wrapped us in the sweet smell of sunshine.

I feel so far from those days now, about to mark my twenty-seventh year on this earth in the dead of winter with snow blanketing my grown-up garden with coldness. Summers feel shorter and shorter and winters longer and longer now. And though I know that I'm still "young," I'm no longer a youth.

Truly, I don't know why I feel so melancholy. I love my life and this age is a good age to be. I have a lot more wisdom than even five years ago, and I enjoy the having that wisdom in my "repertoire," if you will. But I also miss the innocence and optimism of my childhood. The very real dawn of hope that Obama's inauguration has brought is a reminder to me of the many years of pessimism that we have been through. I also guess that the downside of wisdom is knowing "the good and the bad." The price of wisdom is experience. I know what can go wrong, what decision might be bad decisions, because I have suffered the consequences of bad decisions.

But there again is my melancholy. Not everything that I have learned has been at the cost of my own mistakes. I am able to observe others as well and I do.

I don't regret growing older. I wouldn't "hold back the hands of time" if given the choice. This is, after all, the "human experience" and since I believe that this is the one life I have to live, I want to experience it, the good and the bad, so that I might truly know what it is to be human. How should we know joy except that we have also experienced sorrow? I know that I would not miss my grandmothers now, if I had not known and loved them. Yet, I would not choose to have known or loved them less so that it might hurt less now that they are gone. This is life. This is the human experience.

So, I am preparing to celebrate another year's passing in my short time here on earth. I suppose I should be (and am) grateful for the twenty-seven years I have been given. I know that the next twenty-seven will probably seem to pass even more quickly. Perhaps this should be the impetus for enjoying those moments of life. They are sweet, and rarely savored as they should be.

Silence

After the holidays and the madness of our 7 1/2 hour drive to St. Simons Island and same time drive back, I find myself today in silence. I have not listened to music or turned on the TV. I haven't even talked to anyone for several hours. (I did talk to the Powells this morning, but that was still several hours ago.)

I almost watched a video, but nothing even seemed sort of appealing, so I didn't.

The only thing I hear is the clicking of my own typing and the hum of the appliances that I so rarely "hear."

I seldom live in silence. Well, according to Cecelia, we never truly live in silence because there is always the hum of some electrical thing. But what I mean is that I seldom go more than an hour or so without hearing another human voice, even if it is an impersonal and/or unknown voice, such as the TV or music.

I can truly say that I'm enjoying it now. This is rare too. Usually it is "too silent" for me without something turned on.