Out for a drive...

this past weekend with my husband around the county in which I was raised, I felt age. I don't mean I felt my age; I mean I felt age in the most tangible way I ever had. And I thought, of course, what fresh hell is this?

Let's just get all the "fine print" out of the way and say that growing old is a gift and a privilege. I know this down deep in my potentially weak bones. I am aware of how lucky I am to be 53. But dang, the litany of small injustices getting old brings is humbling. 

I'm not just talking about the physical changes or even the mental changes, I'm talking about the way you look behind you and see the past closing up. Not closing in, because the older I get, the further away the past seems. Memories sometimes float in the periphery of my mind; little lost shadows of who I was, way back then. Sometimes, I can grasp them and see them as clearly as when they happened. But mostly, I would assume, I'm just coloring in the blank spaces with what I feel happened and not necessarily what did. My cognitive abilities are intact, they are just behaving their age. I see time erasing footprints and imprints of me and all of the "thems" in my past.

SB and I drove down the lane to the house I lived in my senior year in high school. It was the last place I lived with my entire little family: Mom, Dad, Stacie and Randy. It was in the country, near the river, west and south of the closest village (yes, village). As we made it to the top of the hill at the entrance of the driveway, I entirely lost my bearings. I couldn't figure out where I was, exactly, because my points of reference from my youth were gone. The house, demolished. The green garage where my dad spent a lot of his time (likely taking a break from three teenagers), gone. No big shed in sight. Trees and grass taking over, effectively erasing the landscape and the physical geography of my late teens. And I felt age.

My husband said, "I'm so sorry you are sad." My immediate reply was, "Oh I'm not sad. This doesn't make me sad." and then 5 minutes down the road I realized that I was...sad. The confusion of being unable to physically understand where it had all gone; trying so hard to reconcile what I saw versus what I knew made me sad. It was as if that girl, that 17 year old girl, had disappeared. Yet, she's right here, in the corner of my eye, real and remembering, coloring in the missing parts, making them likely more vibrant than they really were, weaving her into me and also me into her. My feelings now at my age about that time adding wisps of context and understanding that 17 year old Lisa couldn't begin to imagine.

I have, somewhat, become accustomed to my dad slowly disappearing to others and to me. I won't ever, ever forget him, but I can less remember him and more remember who he was to me, remember my memories of him. I have no new ones; just ones I've had over and over. And the memories of him, like that house I lived in when I was too young to appreciate time and age, have become overgrown with what exists now. What I could use as landmarks are vanishing, in real life and in my mind. I can less see him clearly. I have to work harder to hear his voice, because of the everything that's grown up, including me, since the time he was here and would say my name.

As usual, I said all of that to say this, the feeling age part is me, being able to see my past less realistically, being able to hear my youth less clearly, being able to see time closing behind me, covering my tracks, almost as if I'd never been there. It's realizing that it will continue to happen, time swallowing entirely yesterday and the day before and this moment right here, until a point in the future when I read this and I can't even clearly picture that driveway without it's landmarks to center me and show me what direction I used to face. Until that 17 year old girl and even this 53 year old woman is but a haze in the distance.

But, because there is always, always a but, it also, as SB reminded me, means that I am becoming the very newest version of myself. That we are always becoming someone. That the past closing itself behind us like a wake in the water until it become a flat surface with no sign of what was once there, isn't such a terrible thing, because it means we are moving forward, making new imprints, we are living and experiencing and being. We get to forget more than we can ever remember, be confused by what things used to be and how we used to see them, because we are here long enough to see it happen in very real time, the vanishing and the closing. We get to experience age, and that my darling friends is the gift of having time, and it isn't hell at all.