44th Birthday and a 2014 *Flashback*

In my "birthday dress" pinned with Granny's brooch and wearing my happy red shoes

“With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.”~Shakespeare

 It's my birthday and I am happy, not just this day, but joy stays with me.  I have alligator-dry skin that crinkles up like crepe paper when I grin and show my crooked teeth. I have ghostly white skin, knobby knees, shins with the scratches, bruises and the scars of running through the woods...but do you see me? Happiness. Just. To. Be. Alive. 

 "I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing." ~Agatha Christie

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. Agatha Christie
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/agathachri121757.html

Today I am 44 years old. I have been looking forward to it for weeks. Not because of any special occurrence that I felt was bound to happen, just because I am delighted to be given another year. There are some people I know, who when you try to wish them happy birthday, they turn sour and gripe that they don't celebrate birthdays. Or worse yet, what my husband declared last year that, He did not have birthdays anymore. I'm sorry folks, but you only don't have birthdays if you're dead. Some twenty years ago, a local family that had little ones at the same time I did, had a four-year old girl with cancer. When that sweet child died, I got to have another birthday. Why? I don't know, but I am so grateful. And I swore that I would never take one for granted again. I know that little girl would have loved to just get to be five years old. 

Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many. 

My bday supper- ham from our pigs, dad's fresh tomatoes sliced, and his taters in the scalloped potatoes, our bacon in the green beans, and fresh bread. A beautifully set table and then a giant choc chip cookie cake by moma...happy sigh!

I feel younger this year than last. I feel happy and more content in my soul. So many big changes have happened the past years and I have changed too. I never imagined I would be brave enough to teach classes. I never thought I would be intrepid enough to allow my words to be read. I would not have dreamed that I would be planning a trip overseas to Paris! 

I suppose I have realized that I am in my mid-life. A friend once told me, "I am 34. I have lived longer than Jesus got to." What a way to think  about it! If I live to the national average of 78, I am more than half-way. If I get to live as long as my dear Aunt Sharon, then I have seven more years. I don't say this to be morbid or depressing. To me the thought is galvanizing! What do I want to do? How soon can I make it happen? Life is so full of wonder that I don't want to miss a drop.

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" ~Mary Oliver 

I count a new year by my birth date instead of the calendar. It's also when I make resolutions. I'm not gonna say what mine are for this year, only that I am hoping for more patience, courage, and lots of new experiences...
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*FLASHBACK to October 2014*

The lower portion was written just before my computer gave up the ghost and I took a three year forced break from blogging...

     This year we celebrated my 41st birthday in Texas. I woke up early and went out onto the pier alone and just felt the wind and watched the waves and thought how grateful I was to be alive and to get to have 41 whole years. 

When I walked back to the house there was a surprise birthday breakfast awaiting me with birthday candles in sour cream donuts, balloons and party hats. And my boys......my dear, sweet, big 'ole boys had thought to pack me presents they had selected at home. One had found old electrical gauge boxes at an auction and knew that I would love all their switches and levers for some sort of steampunk creation. Another gave me an intricate cut-work card of a Halloween scene (synonymous to me with my bday :) and an I.O.U for the purchase of the most perfect gourd I could find at the market. My youngest had packed up a personal treasure in a firecracker box, one that I had coveted for years...a rabbit's ear that he had dried himself. Yep, you read that right. 

My coveted bunny ear, much more lucky than a foot...

So, you might wonder, Dear Reader, why I am telling you these things. It's just that one doesn't need diamonds and rings to feel loved and understood. Sometimes a bit of junk, a knobby gourd, and a rabbit's ear are enough to make you feel like Queen of the Day.

"Your life is an occasion. Rise to it." 
~Mr. Magorium's Magic Emporium

 
     That evening we all walked down to the pier and a dolphin, the first and only we say in the bay this trip, surfaced and wove sinuously through the waves. It was like a little wink from God saying, "I hope you're enjoying this beautiful life I gave you."

     Then we came home. The week we returned was also my Dearest Friend's birthday. We try to celebrate together every year and so this year I planned a surprise. My dear Aunt Jane built a tiny cabin on the farm with timbers from a civil war era house that was in ruins. If you have read about Aunt Jane in Ocean Vacation then you know what an amazing person she was. The cabin was built to her own plans and with her own hands, right down to the cabinetry. When she moved to Texas she used the cabin as a spot to stay when she came up to visit us and all her Arkansas family. It is still furbished with all her pots, dishes, china, hand-towels. I used it as a real-sized playhouse when I was small. 
   When I graduated, I moved into the cabin as my first home away from home. (Only about 200 yards from home, but that was far enough for me.) When my Dearest Friend first saw it she could not believe it still had all the contents, like Aunt Jane would walk in any moment. "Who leaves whole sets of dishes?" she asked. It was only then I saw it through someone else's eyes. The cabin is like the attic in an old novel where you find everything that had ever been lost.

When I thought of my friend's birthday, I considered flea marketing, a dessert tasting at a restaurant....but settled on the cabin. She loves my strawberry cake recipe, full of chopped berries, so I made cupcakes. I don't usually do cupcakes because I love the look of a layered cake, but I found cupcake picks from our childhood era and couldn't resist using them! I also bought a pack of those terrible hard-sugar decorations that you peel off the paper. They are what I always had on my cake whether it was shaped like a cat, or unicorn, or bunny (thanks, Moma!).

     My cupcake had the number 12 on it. Why? Because, inside, I still feel 12. I had a friend, Mrs. Blankenship, who lived to be 100 and one day. On her 98th birthday she asked me, "How can I be so old when I still feel 16 inside?" I thought about it and am glad that I do not feel sixteen. At twelve I still believed that I would grow up to be an Indian. An Indian brave, not a "squash" who stayed at home and chewed the hides till they were soft. At that age I knew that the woods were the best place in the world to be, that my old cat was my best and most loyal friend. My sweet Great-Granny was still alive, and the world was a shining adventure. All I have to do is sit still and think back and I can remember that time exactly, down to smells and sounds and emotions. Yes, inside I am truly still 12 years old. An old soul with a child's heart.

"I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still apart of me, and always will be. Because I was once a rebellious student, there is and always be in me the student crying out for reform. 
     This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages, the perpetual student, the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but they are a part of me to be drawn on; to forget is a kind of suicide; my past is part of what makes the present Madeleine, and must not be denied or rejected or forgotten.
     Far too many people misunderstand what putting away childish things means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and hear like a three year old, or a thirteen year old, or a twenty-three year old means being grown up. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grownup, then I don't ever want to be one.
     Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy and be fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be a grownup. I still have a long way to go." ~Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

  We also had a layered cream cheese, spinach, sun-dried tomato, basil pesto and pine nut torte to spread onto my fresh baked bread that was rubbed with olive oil and toasted. This was so we could say we had eaten something "good" for us before we dug into cake! The table was set with turquoise and red, her favorite color combo. 

The agenda was nothing more than to talk, look at a crafting magazine and work on some banners we had been wanting to take the time to make. I cherish every moment I get to spend with her and this was no exception. It is truly a blessing to get to share a birth-month (and every month in between) with her. I am thankful to spend another year with you, Dear Friend. And to all of you out there- cherish the days, there are far too few of them in a lifetime.

Make a wish!

"When the day's work is packed away and the house is tranquil and the evening is young, I always feel a swift enchantment. Maybe it is a return to the days of my youth, a swallow dip into yesterday. I think of what Faith says, "Youth is such a wonderful gift and so often bestowed on the wrong people." Then I think some people keep young in spirit and heart as long as they live. Some people never let the color of life wither away into sterility. The leaves glow in October, they soon fall, and bare branches lift to a cold sky. But I should like to keep the color in my heart always."   

~"Stillmeadow Seasons", by Gladys Taber