Another Year Over

Hello!

My birthday is this week and I am trying not to spend it in front of the mirror counting the number of new grays in my hair, or marveling at how the circles under my eyes are dark enough to be their own distant galaxy. I don’t too terribly mind getting older, but everyone in my house has been sleeping poorly this week so all the years hang on my face and in the slump of my shoulders like heavy clouds on a humid day. Is there any age more uneventful than thirty-nine? It’s notable only for what it is not, which is not forty just yet. It is notable only for what you might try to pack into it so that you can say, here is a thing I did before I turned forty. But I don’t have any things I’m trying to do before I turn forty, apart from, I suppose, avoiding getting hit by a bus or other similar freak accidents, but that’s sort of a daily goal for me independent of my current age.

All this to say that I have no big plans for my birthday, or for the year ahead. I have no grand opinions or wisdom to share about my thirties as a decade. I entered my thirties with Donald Trump launching one presidential campaign and I’m closing out my thirties with him yet again running for president, and I honestly can’t think of anything more fucking depressing than that as the marker of a decade of one’s life. But in between I birthed two beautiful little babies who are growing into two delightful little boys who make me laugh and drive me nuts and regularly make me cry tears of frustration and joy. So that’s wonderful. I wrote a ton of stuff, like a whole, whole lot, and I’ve got a lot more on the way. So that’s fun. I got to watch my husband become a dad, but still remain my husband who constantly cracks me up, and regularly rubs my sore feet, and who stares at me dead-eyed and points at his increasingly white-speckled beard whenever I tell him I think I spotted a new gray hair on my head.

I have my complaints but they are mostly small and petty. I have my grievances but they are so much a part of my personality at this point that to air them and release them would be like giving up a part of myself. For the most part, it’s been a fine decade, which I guess says a lot when you consider how much Donald Trump and global pandemic it contained.

The weather in Baltimore this month has seesawed between stunningly beautiful and damp and dreary. Everything is in bloom and the baby is teething, so I have spent a lot of time walking through the neighborhood carrying him in my arms and pointing out all of the new colors popping up along our neighbors’s fencelines. We walk a slow loop and I pick petals off stems and branches. I hold them to his face, and say, “This one is blue. This one is purple. Dandelions are yellow.” I point out robins and say “See the robin?” I point out cardinals and say “There’s a cardinal.” When it starts to drizzle, I tell him, “We are getting wet,” and then I walk us back home and we repeat the process later in the day when the sun comes back out.

It is wild to think that last spring he was too little to discern all of the colors that surrounded him. This is the first spring that he can recognize as a distinct season where things look different than they did just a few weeks ago. When I look back at pictures from this time last year, though, it is not his growth but my older son’s that shocks me. Seven is so much older than six. He has shot up like a sapling that you can now clearly tell will continue to thrive and turn into a tree. It won’t be too long before I am standing in his shadow.

This way of marking time is far more fulfilling than counting the increasing lines on my face. I should measure the years as accumulated loops through my neighborhood, as the sum weight of small, tender-hearted children held in my arms. I should measure the years in stories written, poems completed, published pieces. All of these numbers would be far greater than thirty-nine. Well beyond forty. They would be like the bright pink blossoms on the Kwanzan cherry trees sprinkled throughout my neighborhood: too numerous to count, so lovely they take my breath away.

In celebration of my birthday, both Mother Nature and One Good Thing are currently on sale.

You can get Mother Nature for only $6 through the end of April. And I’ll send you a signed copy of One Good Thing for $7 all in including shipping (US only please!), or you can get it (unsigned) through Bottlecap Press for $8 this month.

Thanks as always for reading and for all your support!

You can find more of my writing & contact information at clairemtaylor.com. If you’d like to further support my work, please consider purchasing one of my books, or a copy of Little Thoughts Press. I also have a ko-fi page.