With every year...

Our evergreens  dwarf us in this photo;  my husband is reduced to a paltry size.
On a sunny January, the maple is bare, looking sad, but the cedar and the century old pine are loving the  80 inches plus of rain they receive every winter.

They look as though time has stood still for a long time in this yard.
The changes have been subtle: branches have been torn down by winds, naturally pruning dead wood.
Roots have grown deeper.


People seem to grow by spurts. As infants, as we double our size and every hair is counted, every tooth celebrated, every inch charted, our  parents fret about our normalcy. In adolescence, we take up the job of worrying about our normalcy.

We count every hair, every where, measure everything, wanting an inch here, fewer pounds there, fretting about our size, dissatisfied with how we look or how much we weigh. We have a running feud with the mirror, the scale and the yard stick.

We seem to be dissatisfied with everything and everyone, especially our parents.

Only after we grow into our fifties, we begin to accept ourselves, more and more with each year that our mirror compares us to our mothers or fathers.  Yes, as we look more and more like our parents, we begin to see all those fine attributes that were too subtle to show up when we all lived under the same roof.

I've become a better person, a better mother, and a more beautiful woman in my sixties. In another decade or so I'll forget any flaws I had in my youth. I'll even forget that I'm old.

I might forget my name too.

How wonderful to know I have beauty and normalcy in my senior years.