The Anniversary

Somehow last week passed without hubby or I actually acknowledging the fact that the first year of living in this house -- in Emporia -- was passing. We got a letter from the realtor that marked the occasion. One year. Has it really been that long? Has it only been that long?

June 15, 2006 -- We signed papers and got the keys to our house.

Lots of cleaning and painting was accomplished.

June 25, 2006 -- We actually moved in. I took my tumble down the stairs.

The simple fact that this was not written on my calendar as a day for celebration probably says enough about the road my mind has been on, but I've found myself thinking a lot about where the last year has taken me. I've been in mourning, I think. Not only for the friends we left behind in Topeka and Lawrence (which I keep telling myself is silly because they are STILL my friends and we STILL keep in touch and they even come to see me sometimes), but for some little part of me that has changed.

I think I met my own mortality a year ago... when we moved into this house. Perhaps the facts aren't logically related, but I think I will always remember this place as where I lived when I learned I wasn't as young as I used to be. Where I learned that young at heart isn't necessarily enough to keep you young of body. It's here where I have begun to notice that my skin isn't as smooth and pretty as it used to be, where I began to pluck weird chin whiskers that seem to appear overnight, where I struggled to maintain my optimistic outlook and had to chase away far too many little black clouds.

There is this passage in Truck; A Love Story, by Michael Perry that I keep playing over and over in my mind.

I am homing in on forty years old. Another twenty years and I'm looking at sixty, and these days, twenty years seems like next Tuesday. I feel young but pressed for time. I am beginning to get a sense of all I will leave undone in this life. It makes my breathe go a little short. I'm not desperate, just hungry to fill the time I am allowed. To cover new ground. I could be wrong, but I don't think I'm having the vaunted midlife crisis. I'm not trying to reclaim my youth or recapture the past. I just want to get that truck running. The past belongs where it is, as it is: an essential, fault-riven foundation for the present. I don't expect that truck to take me anywhere but down the road.