Behind the Puddle

Today is my sister Julie’s birthday.

Birthdays have a way of making us stop and count time.

Another year.

Another trip around the sun.

Another number added to the story.

We celebrate birthdays as individual days, but of course that isn’t really where the growing happens.

It happens in all the days between them.

I see that behind the puddle, too.

There wasn’t one morning when the baby geese suddenly became nearly grown.

The mallards didn’t wake up one day and decide they were finished being little.

The trees didn’t announce that their leaves had reached their fullest shade of summer green.

Even the daylight has been slipping away from us a few minutes at a time.

Nothing asked me to notice.

Life just continued.

One ordinary day into another.

I think sometimes we expect change to have a moment.

A before and an after.

Something we can point to and say:

That’s when it happened.

And certainly, life gives us some of those moments.

Birthdays.

Weddings.

Deaths.

Graduations.

Diagnoses.

Moves.

Retirements.

Beginnings and endings significant enough to earn their own date on the calendar.

But most of our becoming doesn’t happen that way.

It happens on Tuesdays.

While we’re making dinner.

Driving somewhere we’ve driven a hundred times.

Talking on the phone.

Sitting beside someone.

Going to work.

Coming home.

Laughing at something ridiculous.

Getting irritated about something equally ridiculous.

Living days we won’t remember individually.

Until enough of them have passed that we look at someone we love and wonder when they became this age.

Or look in the mirror and wonder the same thing about ourselves.

Maybe continuity is one of life’s quietest gifts.

Even when we aren’t sure what comes next, something does.

Morning follows night.

Seasons move forward.

Children grow.

Relationships collect history.

Places gather memories.

We change.

Sometimes beautifully.

Sometimes painfully.

Usually so gradually that we don’t recognize it while it is happening.

Behind the puddle, I have watched one season slowly become another without ever being able to identify the exact moment when the change occurred.

Maybe our lives are much the same.

There isn’t always a clear dividing line between who we were and who we are becoming.

There is simply another day.

And then another.

And another.

Until eventually we look back and realize how far life has carried us.

So today, while I celebrate another year of my sister’s life, I am thinking about all the ordinary days that made that year possible.

The conversations.

The laughter.

The difficult days.

The completely forgettable ones.

The moments none of us thought to photograph.

All of them quietly adding themselves to a life.

Maybe birthdays aren’t only celebrations of another year completed.

Maybe they are reminders to notice the life continuing between the milestones.

Because most of the story will always happen there.