Changes are inevitable, in fact the only thing you can really depend on in life is that things are going to change.... whether you like it or not. I don't know if I am imagining this or not but the older I get the more things change. I wonder if this is because I am more resistant to change now that I am older but really I dont think so, I think things are just changing. My children keep changing. Everytime I turn around I am at the store buying someone something bigger because they keep growing. Sadie is almost as tall as me and Nora is maybe not growing so much physically but she is growing mountains out of the seeds from her emotional journey. I watched Sadie in her first basketball game today and I couldn't imagine where she had come from, that somehow she is a part of me. At 12 I was ready to hide underneath any sort of covering I could find.... a blanket, an oversized pair of clothing, a heap of overgrown and snarly hair, anything would do. I was happy being part of the unseen. Sadie wants to be seen and wow, is she something to see. She is running up and down that court as if she will never fall down or never miss a basket. I thought for sure, best to take the safe route, I was never going to fall and I was never going to play. And Nora, oh I could kick myself over that one. I had set her on an unpredictable course for sure. Mistakes were made in sending her to that new experimental school.....risky risky risky. And now they have shut down and she had held it together pretty good until she could no longer hold it together any longer and big floods emerged in my bed all night long. Heartbreaking. Things are changing in me too. Things that used to seem so simple are no longer easy. Call it a mid life crisis or it could be all this time I spend living in my head on long car rides from patient to patient but I am starting to wonder about everything and fear nothing. That's not like me. And I want to move all the pieces around to appease me, to direct the path and to know where it is that I am going to end up at the end of the day. I was at a spinning class the other day and the instructor laid out the whole ride for us and it was easiest class that I have done in years. I knew exactly what to expect and I could manipulate the whole ride so that I could make it, survive. I am a survivor. Life doesn't work like that. No one comes down from the sky and tells me what my day is going to look like step by step. I go to Jonah's eye doctor appointments and on any given one I need to be poised for the worst and ready for the norm with a smile and some grace and money for ice cream on the way home. People could decide to move and leave me. Maybe that is why I am always dreaming of moving lately, running away. I will beat them at the quick. And then of course people die. Maybe that's why I do the work I do. I am inundated with the worse possible news one can receive all day long monday through friday. But I am alive. I feel so alive lately with all of these changes around me. I feel a swell of letting go of it all because I am realizing in the end it was never mine to box away anyhow. The flowers that I planted last spring are all dead now and gone and next spring there will be something new in their place and it will be different and it will be the same. Gloucester is a town that never wants to change and I married a man that is like a huge rock in a swirling rolling river of what is me and all that I have brought to him. I will be married to him 13 years this week and he continues to fix himself there again and again and again. While I rage around him and the kids grow and swell and expand and move he is a stayer. This is the season I have been told never to make any decisions in by every good friend I have ever known. So I won't quit my job, I won't move, I won't drop and add friends like they are grocery items. I will place myself next to Gary, a little less solid, definitely more fragile and I will wait for the spring.