Close-out sale - everything must go! (subtitle; the 50s are over)

 

Sitting at my kitchen table in the early morning quiet, I find myself contemplating how I will spend the last day of my 50s. Tomorrow marks a milestone, and it’s no joke how quickly the years move now. I try to write an annual reflection every birthday, but I missed the past two years while traveling back and forth to Alaska during our daughter’s yearlong clerkship. At the time, I pushed the writing aside because other priorities mattered more. But this morning, I woke up determined to share one more annual musing in my 50s.

August 24, 1967; Birthday #1

Cursed with the memory of an elephant, my mind is crowded with milestones. As the designated keeper of all family albums — grandparents, parents, and now my own — the pictures bring everything back. Increasingly, I find myself starting sentences with “When I was a kid…”

To prove my point: when I was a kid, school always started after Labor Day, so my birthday was summer’s last hurrah. My uncle and I shared a birthday, and my aunt and her husband celebrated the day before, so we always had a big picnic at my grandparents’ farm. Jarts, hose water, and assorted childhood treachery were part of the deal. As we grew into late teens and early twenties, that farm stayed our gathering place. We’d take the golf cart on joyrides, and I still laugh thinking about the time my cousin and I tipped it over. We may have been slightly tip‑SY, but I can still see us rolling down that grassy hill in hysterics like it was yesterday.

At our own farm, the huge wraparound porch became the family hub. We usually held a reunion for my mom’s side this very weekend. Her dear cousin Lois never forgot my birthday. She always arrived with a small token and a card. In the middle of a big family party, her remembering stood out.

Most people think of gladiolas as funeral flowers, but for me — alongside zinnias — they are my birthday flowers. I would come down the stairs of our farmhouse on the morning of my birthday to a huge bouquet of seasonal blooms, and I knew with absolute certainty that it was my day.

And what does that mean, exactly? For me, as I’ve said every year, your birthday is the one day that is truly yours. Granted, I shared mine with my uncle, the family reunion, and back‑to‑school sales. Much like Christmas kids lament getting combined presents for their birthdays, I got school supplies. Maybe that’s why I developed a lifelong love of crayons, as I wrote in 2012 in  Raw Umber.

That particular rabbit hole led me to peruse past birthday blog posts. 

• 2013- I shared some pre-menopausal angst Fresh Daily Bread: Getting Older
• 2017 - I realized I abandoned (paused?) my empty nest book- though I still want to SOMEDAY put all those posts together into a book... in my spare time? Fresh Daily Bread: Area 51-- the Empty Nest series continues
• 2019 - I shared a birthday message from my Grandma Fresh Daily Bread: Wisdom from the past
• 2021- I did a reflection on why the half decades seemed to hit me so much harder Fresh Daily Bread: Studio 54 closed
• 2023 - I tried to summarize the past few crazy years of growth and loss Fresh Daily Bread: 57 Channels and Nothin's On

As I close out this decade, I realize my 50s were not quiet years. They were full of motion, full of change, full of people I love, full of losses I carry, and full of growth I didn’t always see happening in real time. They were a decade that asked me to stretch, to adapt, to show up, and to keep finding “something” even when life felt heavy or chaotic or uncertain.

Standing at the doorway of my 60s (or as I perpetually joke, my second 30th birthday), it's not with the feeling of an ending, but with the sense of a handoff. My 50s didn’t wind down; they prepared me. They taught me what matters, what doesn’t, what I want to hold onto, and what I’m finally ready to let go. If the 50s were the inventory, the 60s feel like the next chapter of the story — one I get to write with more clarity, more humor, more intention, and a deeper understanding of what “something” really means.

Approaching 60, I’m carrying one truth with me: it's always going to be something.

Something. Find Something. Do Something. Share Something.

Because the absence? Is Nothing. Happy Birthday to Me!