We're gonna break out the hats and hooters when Josie comes home

My wonderful, colorful, hilarious, delightful Josephine,

Today you are 10 years old. I'm excited to be writing this birthday post for you because I know you are going to read it. The other day I was writing a blog post and you were sitting with me on my bed. You asked me what I liked to write about, and I told you that writing annual birthday letters to you and Zeke is up there on my list of favorites. I showed you some posts that I had written to you and you were utterly tickled by them. So I will show you this one.

I thought it would be fun to post a picture from each year of your life, so here they are:

Fresh out of the box



One year

 

Two - at the science museum

 

Three - awesome hair and face paint



Four - looking fancy at the museum

Five - school picture

Six - of COURSE you are wearing an eye patch to go to camp

Seven - newly pierced ears

Eight - boat ride along the Cinque Terre

Nine - hanging out with me at the mall

Just about ten - first day of fifth grade

So, double digits. Ten years. It's hard to fathom. People say, it all goes so fast, blink and you miss it, and tropes to that effect. But I don't always find that to be true. Ten years is a long time. Giving birth to you was a long time ago. Thinking about you as a baby or a toddler does not feel like thinking about yesterday.

As always, the past year has brought on changes and challenges. A year ago, when you were with your dad, you were living with him and Zeke in a house in Lowry. Today, he is remarried and you live with a new stepmother and four new stepbrothers.

You are not thrilled by this. When you were told that within three weeks your dad would be getting married and you would be moving into a new house with five additional people, you said, "Ugh. I don't even get a sister out of it!"

But you deal, because that is what you do. You deal.

Even as you get older and (somewhat) more mature, though, there are certain things you cling to. You still suck your fingers when you're tired. You don't like being away from me - when we're home, it distresses you if I go into a different room. You still sleep with me when you're with me.

I feel like I should mind this. Like I should insist that you're old enough to sleep alone, in your own bed. But I don't. You and your brother have had a lot of turbulence in your lives since the divorce. Your living situation with your dad has been in a constant state of flux for the past 5 years - different houses, different women, and now four additional children.

My house, on the other hand, has stayed the same. It's comfortable. It's relatively quiet. It feels like home. I know that to you and to Zeke, I feel like home. You tell me all the time how much you love me and how much you trust me. So if cuddling up with me at night gives you a sense of peace, that's fine with me. Getting whacked in the face in the middle of the night when you stretch out your arms is a small price to pay.

Something that has really blossomed this year is your insane sense of humor. You're constantly putting on voices and characters, and providing hilariously random commentary on everything you see. You'll do things like starting calling your grandfather "The Elegant Elderly" and saying, "hello, my good man" in a funny voice when you talk to him on the phone.

You've turned into a reader. You constantly carry books around with you. I finally gave you one of my old kindles so that you wouldn't have to lug around anything too heavy. I love lying in bed with you while we both read.

You like cool music. You change your hair color every other month. Your fashion choices are on the bold side. You walk around the house singing and dancing.

You make me smile and you make me proud.

You are with your dad this week, so I stopped at your school before the bell rang so that I could give you a hug and say happy birthday and tell you about the day you were born. You greeted me with love and joy. I hate not being with you on your birthday, but we will celebrate this weekend when Mimi and Papa are visiting. I can't wait to paint pottery with you, to make a cake with you, to snuggle with you.

I feel extraordinarily lucky to be your mother and to guide you through your childhood.

All the love in my heart,

Mom

Ain't no mountain high enough

It has been five years.

Five years is a milestone. It feels like a significant amount of time, when memory of an event, or a person, starts to fade.  It becomes part of history.

I was thinking about this over the past week with the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I vividly remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard about those planes hitting the towers, I watched them crumble live on TV, I experienced the aftermath. But for a generation of children – including my own – it’s a historical event, before their time. They know about it but don’t feel it. The way I might look back on the Kennedy assassination or the moon landing.

That’s why a yartzeit is so powerful – it’s a deliberate remembering of someone every year. You think about them. You talk about them. You celebrate them and their life and their legacy. You recite the Mourner’sKaddish, which doesn’t mention death at all – it talks about the future.

By doing this climb every year, for Emma and for others, I do what I can so that the memory doesn’t fade. And I do it in a way that is out in nature, and that requires intense physical and mental effort – it’s life-remembering, and life-affirming for me as well.

Christin and I had decided to do our yartzeit hike on Saturday, September 7. Zeke said he wanted to do it too, so the plan was that we would all meet up in Breckenridge on Friday night, spend the night there, and then do the climb Saturday morning.

But then the highway was shut down because of a rock slide, and all efforts to find alternate routes around it were unsuccessful. We were rerouted on secondary roads through canyons to no avail, and ended up having to stop in Central City – home to Colorado’s low rent, tacky-ass casinos – so that poor Zeke could get something to eat because he was feeling sick from hunger. Defeated (though nourished by the casino buffet), we ended up back at home four hours after we left.

At the time, I obviously had no idea that that rock slide would eventually lead to one of the best climbs of my life. That, and my Peloton bike.

Christin and I decided to try again the following weekend. The kids weren’t with me this past weekend and their Australian relatives are visiting, so I didn’t mention the re-do effort to Zeke and decided that if he wants to do a 14er with me, I’ll take him to do another one.

My feelings leading up to the weekend were as they always are – excitement and anticipation mixed with anxiety about the difficulty of the climb. Fourteeners are hard for me. I struggle with the intense exertion at high elevations. Christin is seemingly impervious to it – she clearly has some kind of genetic predisposition to performance at altitude, like she was Tenzing Norgay in a past life or something like that. She’s climbed Kilamanjaro (which tops out at over 19,000 feet), for god’s sake.

I will never climb Kilamanjaro. (I did see Mt. Everest from an airplane a month and a half ago, but I will write about that another time).

Anyway, I was excited and a little nervous. But also curious. Because physically, I am in vastly better shape than I’ve ever been leading up to a climb.

Last Thanksgiving, I was at the tail-end of that miserable time when Zeke was suffering and I was suffering along with him. A woman in my office recently remarked to me that as a parent, you’re only ever as happy as your unhappiest child, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard truer words in my life. I was unhappy and I wasn’t taking care of myself. I had gained 20 pounds. It astounds me to even read those words, but it’s true. I felt awful.

Then I saw my friend Ali at Thanksgiving, and she looked and felt amazing. She had lost 50 pounds using Weight Watchers and regular exercise, and she raved about it.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” I thought.

I signed up for Weight Watchers in December and immediately started losing weight. Around the same time, I felt like I wasn’t getting enough cardio work, so I bought myself a spin bike and started doing Peloton classes via their digital app. I thought about buying the Peloton bike itself, but it’s super expensive and I thought I’d save myself some money.

I diligently did the classes. I enjoyed them and felt myself getting into better shape. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that bike. There are certain metrics that you can track on the Peloton bike that I couldn’t duplicate on my setup. I wanted to be able to track those metrics. I wanted the smoother ride. I wanted that fucking bike.

So in May I bought the bike, and it ended up being some of the best money I ever spent. As with most things that are worth the money, when I climb on the bike – which I do 4-5 times per week – I never think about what I paid for it. I only think about how much I love it and how happy it makes me. I have lost the last of the 20 pounds I gained a year ago.

I started doing a very structured form of training that focuses on power output and that helps  strength and endurance. I do a functional performance test every month or so to track my improvement, and it is steadily going up up up. So in getting ready for the climb, I was curious as to how that training would affect my strength and endurance on the mountain.

We set out for the trail head at about 5:30 a.m. I think we both knew it was destined to be a good day when, independent of one another, we had both chosen to wear Dead & Company concert t-shirts.

The full moon over the trailhead

The plan was to climb Mt. Bross as an out-and-back. Bross is a shorter climb in terms of distance, but having less distance to reach the summit just means that it’s very steep. No gradual uphill walking before hitting the hard stuff – you hit the trail and you’re climbing right away. 

We knew that going in, and we were prepared. The hike was immediately intense. But I was fine. I was astoundingly fine. I didn’t struggle with the altitude at all. We would stop occasionally to have a snack, or to figure out how to pee somewhat discreetly on a totally exposed ridge, or to take a short breather to stretch out our calves. But at no point did I ever have to resort to the 50-steps-then-50-breaths that I’ve had to do in the past as a way to keep myself going. At no point did I feel like I couldn’t get enough oxygen in my lungs, or that there wasn’t enough air in the air. 

No, the problem wasn’t my conditioning or my ability to physically handle the climb. It was that the climb was so steep, with nothing but loose rock and very narrow ridges to navigate, that the thought of descending the same way we went up was utterly terrifying. I had visions of losing my footing and tumbling down with nothing but rocks to break my fall.

Looking down from the ridgeline. It's hard to capture how steep this incline is. It scared the shit out of me.

Up on the ridge, looking back towards our ascent route. Narrow path with steep inclines on either side. No thanks.

So we changed our plan.

Bross is part of a canyon that includes four fourteeners - Mts. Democrat, Cameron, Lincoln, and Bross, commonly referred to as the Decalibron loop. There is a saddle between Democrat and Cameron that has a trail leading down from it that provides a manageable descent back to the trailhead. We didn’t feel like doing Democrat again – its descent can be as nasty as Bross’s – so we decided to go from Bross to Lincoln to Cameron, down the saddle, and then down the trail back to the parking lot. And in the process, bag three peaks instead of just one. 

The Decalibron loop as seen from the trailhead. We started on the right side and went around to the left.

Our route (in yellow)

It turned out to be a fantastic decision. It was a stunningly beautiful day – perfect temperature, clear bluebird skies, very little wind – and the views went on forever. We could see all but one of the summits we had reached in previous years. Through it all, my lungs and heart and legs felt strong.

At the summit of Bross, we talked about Emma and what she was like. We talked about Josh and the grace he has shown in building a good life for himself since Emma and Lori died. We read the names of loved ones who had been given to me by friends and family – parents, children, siblings, friends, students lost to suicide or accident or cancer or old age. I recited the Kaddish for all of them. We cried and talked about life and pain and resilience.

And then we walked. We felt the sun on our faces and the strength in our bodies. We talked about books and told funny stories. We settled on Mexican food and beer for our post-climb meal. We planned future climbs and future trips – the Camino in Spain, perhaps? I nixed the idea of doing Kilamanjaro, but if I continue to train and feel as good as I do now, who knows? My legs are a little sore and tired today, but when I get home from work I will climb on the bike and do an hour-long endurance ride, because I can. Maybe 19,300 feet is a possibility for me after all.

Summit of Bross

Close to the Lincoln summit. That dude over my head is holding a bike. Welcome to Colorado.



Heading up to the summit of Lincoln

Mt. Lincoln summit



Mt. Cameron summit

View back towards the trailhead from the saddle between Mt. Cameron and Mt. Democrat

View of our descent route between Mt. Democrat on the left and Mt. Cameron on the right.



Toasting to an amazing day of hiking

As ever, we were grateful for our health, our friendship, and our lives. It breaks my heart that Emma will never have the types of experiences that I have had – traveling, children, adventure, loss, pain, love, all of it. Maybe doing this yartzeit climb every year, keeping her alive in my memory, is my way of having those experiences for her.

Here we go, yo

Yesterday I was sitting in my office revising a policy document when I blinked and suddenly felt like there was a boulder in my eye.

It was a coffee ground.

In the morning, when I was cleaning the coffee grounds out of my French press, I got it all over my hands and then, like an idiot, rubbed my hands in my face. I was removing coffee from various parts of my face for the rest of the day.

The day before, I was texting my cleaning lady to let her know that I don't need her to come next week because I'll be out of town. She responded by informing me that I had left the stove on.

This is not like me. I am a clear and rational thinker.

But my brain is all over the place this week.  On Monday I had such a flood of adrenaline and nervous energy that physically, it felt like the worst anxiety attack I've ever had in my life. I stopped for coffee and my way to work and realized that if I drank it, I'd go into orbit.

A week or so ago Lisa and I were talking about excitement but also nervousness about our upcoming India trip - as I type this, I'm leaving for the airport in three hours.

The excitement is obvious. And so is the nervousness, I think. It's a long way. It's a long time to be away from our homes and our children. I already haven't seen my kids in two weeks - they're in Mexico with their dad. So by the time I get home, it will be a month - I've never been away from them for that long.

And Lisa said that she hadn't been in such extremes in a long time - maybe since we were last in India. Extreme heat, extreme crowds, extreme poverty.

It's a lot.

But as it's gotten closer and closer - three days, two days, TOMORROW!!! - the nervousness has abated and the happiness has settled in.

I'm so happy to be doing this trip. I'm so happy to be doing this trip with Lisa. We're organized, we're vaccinated, we're packed.

My mother and I were talking about it yesterday and I was describing all the amazing things we're going to do. We're staying at Claridges in Delhi, where as moronic teenagers we used to go after school to drink gin & tonics. We're taking a flight along the mountain ridge that includes Mt. Everest. We're staying in a palace in Udaipur. We're staying with one of our old classmates in Kathmandu. We're going on Monday to see our school.

"Oh, Wendy. That's so incredible. I'm so happy that you're going on this trip. Thinking about you and Lisa seeing the school again after all this time - it makes me want to cry."

"I know. I know. Me too. It's crazy - being there was such a special and formative time of my life. I think being back there is going to be incredibly emotional. It's overwhelming."

Rajeev, our classmate in Nepal, called me the other day at 4:30 in the morning. He's in Thailand and didn't realize I was in Denver.

But it didn't matter. I was up.

I haven't spoken to him in 31 years, so we were catching up. I mentioned I was divorced.

"I'm so sorry!" he said.

"Oh, don't be. I'm not."

I'm so not. I'm free. I can do what I want. I feel empowered. The divorce was the beginning of me figuring out how I want to live. And bit by bit, I have. I feel better about myself and my life than I ever have.

My friend Christen is in school to become a therapist. A while ago she was telling me about this exercise that her class did in which the instructor asked people to think of a life motto or guiding principal that could be distilled down to something that could be small tattoo.

I thought about it for a second and said, "say yes."

Say yes to adventure, say yes to new experiences, say yes to love, say yes to opportunity.

When Lisa told me last year that she wanted to do a trip back to India this year to celebrate her birthday, she asked me if I wanted to go.

I didn't hesitate.

"Yes."

So off we go, and I'm so ecstatic I can barely stand it.

Happy birthday, beautiful. In the fields of this day, hear a song.

My dearest Emma,

You would have been 22 years old today.

Everything is making me cry.

Zeke was Charlie in his class's production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yesterday. He worked really hard to memorize his lines. Josie and I have run lines with him over the past few weeks. I have helped him on the singing part - how to do some of the harder transitions to the high notes. How to think about what his character is going through in the moment so that his actions and reactions feel more authentic.

And he nailed it. The whole performance was so cute - all the kids were great. Their energy was amazing. Zeke hit the high note at the end of The Candy Man. We were all so proud.

I cried. Such naches.

My parents flew in for the performance, because that's what we do in our family. We show up for each other. They cried, too.

Assuming all had gone according to schedule, you would be graduating from college right about now. Maybe you would have ended up at the Naval Academy. Maybe you would have taken another road altogether. Whatever your choice, I know you would have done great - with your work ethic and your zest for life, you would be successful at whatever you decided to do.

We all would have shown up. We undoubtedly would have cried.

I have had a number of photos printed out to put on the wall next to my staircase. It's mostly pictures of my own kids, from trips that we have taken, but I also have one of my grandparents at my wedding, and one of you and your sisters when Hazel was a baby. You were 11 - Zeke's age.  My parents and I were looking at it yesterday, missing you and mourning your loss.

The school district where I work experienced a school shooting this week. A young man who was 18 years old, who was three days away from graduating, died when he rushed the shooter to try to disarm him. He was his parents' only child, and by all accounts he was a wonderful person. A great kid.

I know what they are going through because I watched my brother, your mother, and your sisters go through it. It makes me cry to think about it.

You were a wonderful person. You were a great kid.

We don't always remember you with sadness. We frequently remember you when we're telling funny stories. Like the time when we were at the Outer Banks when you were three. Your parents went home early and you stayed with my parents for a few extra days. We were driving back to their house and we stopped at a diner for some food.

You were delightful and adorable. You had a super cute (and totally developmentally normal) speech tendency in which you mixed up hard consonants that were made with the back of the throat with those that were made at the front of the mouth. "K" became "t." "G" became "d." "Come" became "tum." "Girl" became "durl."

We were finishing lunch and getting ready to go when you said, "where are you going?"

"We're going back to Virginia," I said.

And you responded, "can I tum?"

I laughed and scooped you up and gave you a kiss. "Of course you can tum, silly."

I would have taken you anywhere you wanted to go.

We all miss you and think about you and talk about you. We won't ever stop loving you.

Love,

Wendy

So fill up your cups, your loving cups, as full as full can be

Late last year my Virginia girlies and I made a plan to have a mini-reunion girls' weekend in Florida. It's the 50th birthday year for many of us - not me, yet, as I liked to remind them - and that provided us with as much a good reason as any to plan a trip when we could hang out on the beach and eat and drink and sleep and relax and get caught up.

We picked a weekend in mid-March. We found an AirBnb in Boca Raton with a pool, plus it was close to the beach. We determined that giant pool floaties of the unicorn-shaped variety were a must. We were super excited to see each other.

Then we just had to wait for the day to arrive.

Of course, because Colorado's weather in the spring is batshit crazy, a monster bomb cyclone snowpocalypse blizzard had to hit the day before my friend Jen and I were flying out.

The weather forecasters weren't wrong. The storm was a beast. That Wednesday the kids and I hunkered down in the house the way we've hunkered down for Category 1 hurricanes on the Outer Banks. I pulled the chairs in from the upstairs porch and secured the garbage cans and that sort of thing. Then we watched movies and drank hot cocoa and listened to music. The wind was whipping hard, blowing snow all over the place.

The kids were nervous.

"Are we going to be OK? Is the house going to be OK?"

"We'll be fine, guys. This house is 123 years old. It has survived many storms. It's tough."

The power went off at one point for about 5 minutes. When it came back on, we resumed watching whatever we had been watching.

The girls and I had been texting about the trip.

"Is it going to mess up your travel?"

"Nah, it should be fine. Flights are all cancelled today, but the weather is supposed to clear up tomorrow, so I don't think it'll be a problem."

(NARRATOR: It was a problem.)

On Wednesday afternoon, I received a text from United that my Thursday morning flight had been cancelled. But hey, feel free to rebook on our website or our mobile app!

Feeling sick to my stomach, I tried to rebook. Nothing was available. No direct flights (which is what I had), no connecting flights, no flights into other airports around the Miami area, nothing.

I was in tears. I couldn't bear the thought of not going on this trip that I had been looking forward to for so long, I called United. I was on hold for an hour before I was connected to a person.

Finally, finally, a lady picked up and began a 45 minute process of working her ass off to try to find me a flight that would get me in Thursday night (instead of Thursday afternoon) or, at the latest, Friday morning. She was tireless and patient, and got me onto a flight that got in late Thursday night. Instead of direct, I had to connect through Houston. But I would get there. Poor Jen was not as fortunate, which totally sucked.

Of course, the travel was not without its drama. My flight from Denver was exactly as late as the length of my layover in Houston, so I got off the plane in Houston and literally (literally literally, not figuratively literally) sprinted from one end of the Houston airport to the other in order to make my flight.

Which, going from sitting for hours to a full sprint, is not a good look. I'm more of an endurance athlete, not a sprinter. And I was wearing boots with heels and the wrong bra for sprinting. So I was teetering through the airport pulling my suitcase with one hand and holding my boobs with the other. By the time I made my connecting flight I was wheezing and coughing so severely that I feared I would puke. Literally.

But I didn't puke. And I was on the flight. I arrived in Fort Lauderdale and then took a Lyft up to Boca and everyone was awake and waiting for me when I arrived just after midnight.

I immediately relaxed and felt the love. Y'all know how much I love reunions.

The house was beautiful. The pool was beautiful. The beach was beautiful. My friends are beautiful. We relaxed and ate chips and salsa and watched basketball and swam. We hung out at the beach. We took a mellow booze cruise and went stand-up paddle boarding in Lake Boca, which is basically a giant tailgate party with boats. We floated on unicorns.

 

If I were any more relaxed I'd be dead

Susan brought souvenirs for everyone - personalized to-go cups with our initials in UVA colors, perfect for beer or wine or whatever else we wanted to carry around. We took them everywhere we went.

There is something so amazing about being with girlfriends that you have known for 30 years. We feel so comfortable around each other, and we know each other so well, and all of the bullshit anxiety that we carried around as 19 year olds - about fitting in, being cool, looking and dressing the right way, all of that shit - is gone. We own and embrace our flaws because they contribute to who we are, which is something to be celebrated. We can just talk and laugh and be honest with each other. It's the best.

After we had all returned home, I got a notification from AirBnb that Bob, our host/property manager, had left a review.

"Loved having these young women at our beach house!"

I don't know that we particularly feel like young women anymore. But maybe we keep each other young.

In any event, we'll take it for as long as we can get it.

Sometime's he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer

A few weeks ago Zeke had some friends over and after that my beloved Cutco French chef's knife went missing.

I've had that knife for over 27 years and it is my favorite. I use it every day. I've never used a knife that feels as good in my hand or that is so perfectly balanced.

When I was in law school, my roommate and I had some friends over for dinner. The guys were in the kitchen while I cooked and started futzing around with the knife. I yelled at them, not because I was worried they would cut themselves, but because I didn't want them messing with my expensive knife.

So a few weeks ago, I was cooking something and getting ready to cut some vegetables. I opened my knife drawer and reached for the French chef's knife - it lives in the far right slot of this knife tray - only to realize it wasn't there.

"Huh," I muttered to myself.

I went and looked in the sink. Not there. I looked in the dishwasher. Not there.

At that point I had exhausted the list of possible locations where it could be. I am not a meticulously neat person -- except when it comes to my kitchen. Everything has its specific spot. Everything always gets put away in that specific spot, every single time. Always always always.

I asked the kids where my knife was. They professed ignorance.

I looked all through the kitchen. Every drawer, every cupboard, in the fridge, in the freezer. Everywhere. I did this multiple times.

I asked Zeke if he and his friends had been playing with the knife. He denied it, but he's a shameless liar, so who knows.

I looked throughout the house, under beds, on shelves, on tables and desks, in bookshelves. I did this multiple times.

I became increasingly irate. I told the kids that everyone was grounded until my knife was found. They started to cry, so I backed off and offered a reward of $25 to anyone who found it or provided information leading to its discovery.

My friends on Facebook made a number of suggestions, my answers to which were as follows, in no particular order:

I don't carry my 15-inch-long knife in my purse. It's not in the kids' backpacks because I don't make their lunches. I don't take the knife with me anywhere outside the kitchen. I would never loan it out.

People kept saying, "it'll turn up, things like this happen...

Actually, they don't. Knives don't just up and waltz themselves out of the kitchen.

The only thing I could think of was that Zeke and his friends had taken it. Nothing else made sense, especially with those particular friends. One is a sneaky little shit and I'm convinced the other is going to end up murdering his parents in his sleep. Possibly with my knife.

The next day I got a call from Zeke.

"Hey, mom! I think I found your knife?"

"Is that so? Where?"

"On the top shelf of Josie's closet!"

The ceilings in my house are very high. Getting to the top shelf of Josie's closet would be quite an undertaking.

"Really. That's very interesting. What were you doing poking around the top shelf of Josie's closet?"

"Oh, uh... I wanted to look at the box that has the fire escape ladder...."

"Uh huh."

"No really!"

"Whatever."

He texted me a bit later.

The kid's got balls, I'll give him that.

Needless to say, he and I had another long talk about how I can't stand it when people lie to me, especially when they're so fucking bad at it. I always know. Always. ALWAYS.

Nobody got the $25.

It costs money because it saves money

For someone who lives in a place that is highly affected by the weather, I tend to be largely oblivious to it before it happens. Every morning I say, "Alexa, what's the weather today?" so I know what I can or should wear to work, but I'm always surprised by the answer.

I mean, not surprised as in "shocked." She doesn't tell me the day's high and low temperatures only to have me go bug-eyed and say, "WHAAAT???" But I don't pay enough attention to the forecast that I'll have a general sense of what she's going to say before she says it. I'm more reactive than proactive.

"Oh, it's snowing in the mountains? Sweet, I'll go ski tomorrow!"

Saturday I was having a lazy day, just kind of dicking around doing laundry and watching sports. I looked out the window at one point in the afternoon only to realize that there were 3 inches of snow on the ground and it was supposed to continue through the night.

"Huh," I though. "I guess I'll go shovel the sidewalk."

That's when I realized how cold it was. A good day to shovel and then go back inside to chill out.

It stayed really cold.  And then this morning when I got up to go to work, I went to brush my teeth and when I turned on the water nothing came out.

"Hmm," I thought.

I checked to make sure I hadn't forgotten to pay my bill. Nope - no problem there.

I went down into the cellar to see if there was flooding or anything overt. Nothing looked unusual.

So I called a plumber.

"Do you think my pipes are frozen?" I asked.

"Could be. Why don't we come out and take a look."

"I need to go to work. Could you do an afternoon appointment? Is it ok to leave? The house isn't going to blow up, is it?"

I have no idea why I asked that. I'm really not a ditz when it comes to home repairs.

"You should be fine. Leave one of the faucets on - maybe they will thaw out if it gets sunny later."

So I left a faucet on, and figured that if I needed to, I could stay in a hotel if I didn't have water for a couple of days.

I was talking to my mom about it as I drove to work.

"Ugh, the house is so old, I figured something like this would happen eventually. It'll probably cost me thousands of dollars."

"Well, I hope it's not that much," she said.

"Remember Moonstruck? Plumbing costs $10,000." 

Everything I know about plumbing I learned from Moonstruck.

"But do you have copper pipes?" she asked.

"In fact, I do. I checked!"

I got to work and went about my day. I spent many hours in meetings where people yelled, sometimes at me. I went to truancy court. I tried not to think about getting home to burst pipes and water everywhere.

Some people at work said that a lot of times when pipes freeze, it's no big deal. You just have to wait for them to thaw. I actually felt very zen about it.

But then I got home and turned on the faucet. And water came out!! And the faucet that I had left on upstairs was running. Huzzah! It was a huge relief.

And I'm convinced it worked out because I had copper pipes, just like Cosmo said I should.

Today I didn't even have to use my A.K., I got to say it was a good day

I turned 49 a week and a half ago.

That same day I went skiing and pushed myself hard, skiing through trees (which I had basically never done before) and burning my legs out on moguls. Then that night I went out for a fun birthday outing.

It's always fun to celebrate something, and a birthday is as good an excuse as any. I'm shameless about asking for a free drink or dessert. I mean, all they can say is "no," right?

On a deeper level, though, I have no idea what that number means. I mean, obviously, I understand the numerical value of 49. But as an age - as my age - I don't know how to feel.

I know how my children feel. They think I'm fucking ancient. Josie has been fascinated by my age for a while now. It's become a running joke that I'll go skiing with the kids and sometimes we'll get in the single line because it's quicker, and then meet up at the top. Invariably, Josie will start chatting with the people on her chair lift, and by the time they get to the top, they know all about me, including that I've got one foot in the grave, at least according to my daughter.

Often they will wait with her until I arrive, and say, "we know everything about you. We know where you've lived, where you've traveled, what you do for a living, how old you are..."

"She's 49!" Josie will repeat.

They laugh. "She's adorable!"

Whatever.

As an age, 49 is sort of unremarkable. It's the last time I can say I'm in my late forties, but it's not quite 50. Now 50 - that feels insane to me. My grandmother was 50 when I was born. When I was younger, 50 was super close to death.

But I don't feel old. I don't even feel middle aged. I have friends my age who refer to themselves as middle-aged and I'm always taken aback by it.

I hear and read about women reaching a certain age - i.e., my age - and starting to feel invisible. They lament that while men in their late 40s and early 50s are still considered attractive and virile, women of the same age fade away in the eyes of society.

I feel fortunate that that has not been my experience, at least not yet. Physically I feel as strong as I ever have. My skin is holding up pretty well. By virtue of not having been able to breast-feed, my boobs are still relatively perky. Men, particularly younger men, still notice me.

As my friend Ali observed, "yeah, 50 is the new 30 or whatever. Of course, 60 is still 60, so...."

I've got some time.

And honestly, I'm very happy with where I am in my life. I have a wonderfully rewarding career. I'm strong and healthy and in shape, particularly since I lost 10 pounds doing Weight Watchers. My kids are great, I have friends and family whom I love. I live in a place that lets me pursue things I love, like skiing and hiking and travel and culture.

Maybe that's the best thing about being in your late 40s. You can enjoy life more because you have lost  the ability to give a fuck about stuff that's inconsequential. I don't worry about the opinions of people I don't know, or who I'm not connected to emotionally. I'm confident in my abilities. Nothing makes me nervous. I feel prepared for whatever comes.

I can't feel the weight of age when I'm still jumping at the chance to see Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube and Warren G at Red Rocks next month. Or flying down mountains with Zeke, going as fast as we can go. Or climbing fourteeners. Or surf camp in Mexico. That's all got to count for something, right?

So I'll keep on keeping on and feel fine about it.

I can freak out next year when I turn 50. For now I'm good.

Happy birthday to me

Fear of fire, or why I won't marry for money

I was leaning over the stove trying to scrape ground turkey that had accidentally fallen on the side of the pot rather than into it, when I was making a batch of chili.

Suddenly I smelled something burning.

I looked to the counter and saw that a paper towel that was too close to the flame had caught fire. I had a flash of "aaaauuuughhhh," and then, because there was no one else to deal with it, I picked up the non-burning end, tossed it into the sink, and turned the water on.

I had a very different reaction when my mother and I were cooking Thanksgiving dinner in November and we opened the oven door to discover that the oven wasn't just preheating to cook the turkey roulade - it was on fire.  Flames were shooting out from the bottom pan of the oven.

I am terrified of fire. I consider myself relatively fearless - I don't worry about being mugged or eaten by bugs or of walking by myself at night. But fire - and particularly kitchen fires - seriously freak me out.*  Maybe reading too many news articles in the Times of India about dowry killings when we were there - mothers-in-law who murdered their new daughters-in-law, but it was always made to look like a mysterious kitchen fire.

Although I suppose that if I need to be worried about being burned up in a dowry fire, I would have to be married to someone whose family only wanted me for my dowry. At this point in my life, I don't think my parents would pay someone to take me off their hands. And I'm certainly not forking over the cash. I don't have any particular desire to get married anyway. So there. Eat shit, imaginary future mother-in-law.

Anyway.

My mom and I looked at each other. We are both intelligent, sensible, highly educated people. But we were paralyzed.

What do we do??

My brother Josh was sitting calmly at the kitchen table reading the newspaper.

I said, "JOSH! What do we do when the oven's on fire???"

Josh is always a calm presence. He's level headed. He knows what to do. He doesn't freak out.

He came over to the oven. There was obviously some substance or object burning under the bottom pan, but we couldn't figure out what it was. A number of options were thrown out.

One of them involved trying to smother the fire with flour. That ended up just making a mess.

Finally Josh figured out how to remove the lower pan. What we found was a ton of dog food, some of it in flames. No one could understand how any of it got there.  We cleaned it out.

Buster must have been to blame. But Josh saved the day.

That's what he does.

_______
*I am also terrified of birds, but that's another story.