Perphaps it's the half dozen staples holding a rough line lacing my abdomen or the completion of the first holiday season without either daughter, but I'm feeling the shift of time today.
What had previously been an excuse for new calendars and several weeks of checks voided with wrong dates, is now a frank realization of another slice cut from the loaf.
My life has never been afflicted with sameness, but I'm considering that possibilities are no longer infinite.
Exciting aspirations (write and sell that book!) become millstones in just of few years of tarnish. I didn't even send my agent a holiday card this year.
It's not malaise or even age. The holidays were exceptionally precious this year with pre-surgical time blocked between various contingents of family for the celebration of old and the creation of new traditions. The investment of moving back home to Buffalo is paying off in ways never imagined.
The unexpected week off from work has been oddly relaxing. This is probably the longest in decades of employment I have not opened my work email account or spread out a business file. The hospital stay was brief and our bedroom is looking less like a MASH unit each day.
I was sleeping through my first day home when Toni brought over homemade beef vegetable soup and a gift box of warm, fuzzy house socks - perfect tonic for the time.
And in thinking about that simple act, I have just destroyed the premise of this rambling.
Toni and her husband didn't even move to town until this summer. She and I have packed a tremendous amount of adventure into a short few months. Her friendship didn't fill an empty space, but open a new chapter in a thick, rich, volume.
If I consider the friends past years have given and allowed me to carry forward, my diminishing loaf concept crumbles.
Yes, age and time offer physical limitations. But bikinis were never my style.
After an early dinner out with family on the 31st (where laughter was the biggest challenge to my stitches) Charlie and I came home to watch PBS. We settled into bed five minutes into the new year with echoes of the downtown fireworks as a lullaby. Hardly the glamour of previous celebrations, but quietly satisfying.
The next day I asked Charlie what he wanted for the 2007. He rattled off three simple, attainable goals: get me healthy, see our daughters, buy a house this summer.
Without consultation, I'd have to say he laid out my list perfectly.
In fact, I'll add delivering that manuscript to my list and announce in advance that if we pull off the first three -- 2007 will be a good year.