A Million Tiny Moments

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

Today is Hub’s birthday. Laughing together over the weekend we experienced the same discussion that seems to come up  at most birthdays of late,  “how can we be  (insert age)? “  Because we don’t feel any certain age, most of the milestone birthdays have come and gone, and any that are not here yet we are not looking forward to as much as say 21 or 30 or 16.

Life keeps happening. Time rolls by like the C & O railroad being built across the nation! Piece by piece, year by year it happens.

The days become a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments.  It involves so much effort and work and there are so many different days, all rolling into each other like a snow man being created by wet soggy cold children. It is lopsided and lumpy and it’s hard to lift when it is all stuck together.

Raising children was such a crazy, amazing, sticky, messy day by day conglomeration of tucking in and laundry, laughter and tears, school buses and track meets, first dates and graduations, dogs, snakes and more dogs, camping trips and trips to the grocer.

It takes so much time, and so much work, and those pieces and snippets of days are so small yet so huge. They are so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies and at the same time so much more.

But what I’m finding, in glimpses and flashes, in the best possible way, life is about celebration and mundane. I think adventure, if we want it to be, is the 200^th walk in the same neighborhood, with the same man whom we have promised to love forever. The life we keep watching for is unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, regular days ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers, amidst of fears and laughter,  our fights and secrets – this life is the most ordinary life and the most precious thing any of us will ever experience.

Last night I set out a breakfast bowl, orange juice glass and a box of cocoa krispies for my birthday guy. I taped the same crumpled plastic “happy birthday” banner that we have used at every family birthday for the last 25 years, on the bathroom mirror with I LOVE YOU written in lipstick. I could imagine his smile when he stumbled into the bathroom barely awake and was greeted with a crazy moment just for him.

Celebration today. No matter he has told me no gifts and “I am all he needs.” This makes me smile of course because those words are what my parents would say to each other. It’s true though- stuff is stuff and while it is great to be given more stuff on special days, each other, day after day is truly all that matters.

Happy Birthday sweet Hubs. I love you.