Today is my birthday.
Twenty-seven years have I been on this planet now. It feels like longer. And yet it's going so much faster now than it used to, faster than I have figured out how to handle.
My friend Nicole is coming over tonight. We were supposed to go out for dinner, but plans have changed slightly and now I'm going to be cooking dinner here. That makes me really happy, actually, because I love to cook. I'll be making chicken cutlets with asparagus, capers, and shallots. And for dessert, a blood orange polenta upside-down cake with whipped crème fraîche. I like the idea of making my own birthday dinner, as antithetical a concept as it seems to most people (cooking on your birthday? Pshaw!).
Then, I'm having a party this weekend, which will consist of dinner at a restaurant here in Montclair called Raymond's, followed by bowling at Eagle Rock Lanes in West Orange. I miss bowling, quite frankly, and I know how fun it can be, so I thought, what the heck...let's do bowling! I'll just be happy to see my friends and to spend time with them.
For now, though, it is quiet. The skies are grey outside and the temperatures have dropped from the record highs of this past weekend. In truth, I'm glad they did. I prefer the slow increase from cold to warmth, rather than it happening so suddenly. Already, the tree outside my bathroom window has begun to bud. The grass is green from the rains we've had over the last week, and the earth is beginning to awaken again.
It's all about time. Things happening in their own due time, like with nature. Everything that's happened over this past year has brought me to where I am now, and I really feel like there are some great things in store for 2010. I've learned by now not to get my hopes up, so I will simply follow the old adage taught to me by my dad: Hope for the best, expect the worst.
When I went to a Herstory womens' writing group last week, one of the women there asked me how old I was. I told her, and she said, "Wow...you look like you're seventeen," in this sort of awed voice. It's hard to believe that I left 17 behind so long ago. I spent many years trying to run away from it, to run as far as I could from the awfulness of high school and my adolescence. At last, I finally feel like I can stop running, and just continue through life at a casual stroll.
Happy, happy birthday to me...
