Today, at 12:10 in the afternoon, I will officially be fifty-six years old. I was born at Lutheran Hospital in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 6, 1970, which makes me a Virgo by date and, depending on who you ask, apparently explains quite a bit about me. I can certainly recognize some of those traits in myself, although I have always suspected that if we look hard enough, most of us can find pieces of ourselves in almost any astrological sign.
What I know with considerably more certainty is that I could never have predicted the person who would arrive at fifty-six.
This has been a long year. Not necessarily long in the way a calendar measures time, but long in the way some years seem to contain several different lives within them. There have been difficult days, physical limitations, uncertainty, frustration, sleepless nights that became mornings, plans that changed, things I had to accept, and things I am still learning how to accept.
There have also been beginnings I never saw coming.
Somewhere along the way, a small patio outside our walkout basement became possible because we were trying to solve a very practical problem. My body was making it increasingly difficult to get outside, and I needed a place where outside did not require navigating stairs, uneven ground, or more energy than I had available. Brian created a place where I could simply open the door and go outside.
At first, that was enough. Then I started looking beyond the patio.
There was the puddle, although technically it is considerably more complicated than a puddle. There were geese and ducks, squirrels and birds, herons, dragonflies, turtles, chipmunks, a beaver, a toad who somehow makes me ridiculously happy, and countless little lives carrying on whether I was paying attention or not. Some became familiar enough to earn names, routines became recognizable, and absences became noticeable.
I started paying attention differently.
The funny thing is that I had lived here before any of this began. The puddle had been here. The trees had been here. Many of these animals had probably been here too, moving through their own lives while I moved through mine.
What changed was not necessarily the world outside my door. I changed.
On June 30, I wrote the first Puddle Story. I did not know I was beginning anything particularly important. I was simply telling a story about something I had noticed, but one story became another, and somewhere between the Lone Goose, Pinecone, Stella and Stanley, the Green Heron, Shelly, Chuck, the hummingbirds, the geese families, and all the others, Behind the Puddle began becoming something neither Brian nor I could have predicted.
Brian once told me, “I have a completely different wife since you started the Puddle Stories.”
I think he was right.
Not because the difficult things disappeared. My body did not suddenly become cooperative. Pain did not leave, exhaustion did not disappear, limitations did not stop being limitations, and there have still been days when getting through the day has required considerably more effort than I wanted to give it.
But pain stopped being the only thing in the room. There was something else to notice.
There was a heron patiently waiting for a fish. There was a tiny toad sitting beside the fountain, a hummingbird visiting the salvia, a squirrel negotiating for breakfast, geese raising their families, and a solitary bird passing through on a migration that had absolutely nothing to do with me. There were things arriving, things leaving, things returning, and things simply continuing.
Maybe that is where the deeper change began.
For most of my adult life, much of my work has involved endings. Death education, advance care planning, grief, memorials, legacy, caregiving, and conversations people often postpone until circumstances force them to have them. I still believe deeply in that work, perhaps more than I ever have.
But the puddle reminded me that talking about death has always really been a way of talking about life.
Planning Forward began taking shape differently. Waypoints emerged as a way of recognizing where we might be within an experience without pretending we can tell someone where they should go next. Human Needs gave language to things that matter within those experiences, things like being seen, heard, welcomed, understood, remembered, accepted, loved, and knowing that we have a place.
Eventually I realized these were not separate projects. They were all asking variations of the same question. What matters while we are here?
That question has followed me into conversations about death and into mornings watching geese. It has followed me into discussions about advance directives and into photographs of a Green Heron I once would not have known how to identify. It has appeared in stories about my dad, my grandchildren, my mother, Brian, friends, old belongings, ordinary routines, accessibility, memory, grief, and the strange collection of creatures who have unknowingly become part of my days.
It has even followed me into a little twenty-seven-year-old Mercedes named Saylor.
A year ago, I certainly would not have predicted that I would spend part of a weekend in the summer watching Brian bring a 1999 SLK230 back to life, celebrating when she finally started, taking Hadley for a top-down ride, or planning a birthday drive toward Saylorville Lake. Yet somehow Saylor belongs in this story too because she is another reminder that something sitting still for a long time is not necessarily finished.
Sometimes it just needs the right conditions to move again. I think I understand that differently now.
There are things about this year I would gladly have done without. Growth sounds beautiful when we talk about it after the fact, but living through it can be uncomfortable, inconvenient, painful, frightening, and exhausting. Becoming does not always look like forward movement while it is happening.
Sometimes becoming looks like resting because your body has made the decision for you. Sometimes it looks like changing the plan. Sometimes it looks like admitting that something that once worked no longer does.
Sometimes it looks like sitting in a chair beside a puddle and discovering that the world is still remarkably interesting from exactly where you are.
I have also learned that noticing does not require possession. I do not need the heron to stay for it to matter that it came. I do not need every relationship, season, role, ability, object, or experience to remain unchanged in order for it to have mattered deeply.
I can love something and still allow it to leave. I can miss something and still continue. I can remember who I was without requiring myself to remain her. That may be one of the greatest gifts fifty-five gave me.
Today I become fifty-six, although I know now that becoming rarely happens at a particular hour on a particular day. It has been happening quietly through all of these ordinary moments, through difficult days and good ones, through conversations at ridiculous hours of the night, through stories I never expected to write, and through a puddle I almost certainly underestimated.
There is still a great deal I want to do.
I want Behind the Puddle to keep growing without losing what made it meaningful in the first place. I want Planning Forward and the death education work to continue becoming more accessible and more human. I want to keep writing about grief and memory and belonging, continue developing Waypoints and Human Needs, keep noticing the lives around me, and continue finding ways to help people feel a little less alone in experiences that are simply part of being human.
I also want to keep changing. Not because who I am today is unfinished in some unacceptable way, but because I hope I never become so certain about myself or the world that I stop noticing something I had not learned to see yet.
Today at 12:10 PM, fifty-six officially begins.
I do not know what this year will bring. I know there will be things I cannot control, things I will have to adapt to, things I will lose, things I will discover, and probably more than a few nights when sleep refuses to cooperate. There will almost certainly be unexpected visitors outside the patio door and stories I cannot possibly know how to write yet because they have not happened.
For once, I do not need to know. I think I will just keep watching the puddle.
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