day six: black sea/red sea

We've moving closer to the vernal equinox. I learned that every year in March, after the equinox, we gain two more minutes of light per day instead of one. My father-in-law told me that, and it's one of two things I can remember him saying. The other is that I am only other person he's met that picks the extra-white embryo out of egg yolks before frying.

The day I turned 27, I told my husband that it was gonna be my year. I'm a few weeks from 30, and I can check off grown up stuff that's happened to me in the last three years easily, like buying a condo and starting a 401(k). But I wonder how much progress I've made creatively, if I would ever feel like I'd written enough, took enough photographs, recorded enough radio stories.

Moving into a new decade, I'm like a bean bag somebody unzipped. All these little white bulbs scatter across the kitchen floor. It's the 80s, and I'm still a kid, only I know it and so it feels easier. I love you.

A short list. In my twenties I ______________________

stopped thinking so much about dying of terminal illness
fell in love with terry gross and ira glass
stopped buying so much coffee, started drinking tea
recorded bits and pieces of radio stories
took photographs of my friend giving birth
got good with a loupe
went to Europe three times
wanted to go to Israel, Turkey, and Bulgaria a whole hell of a lot
got better at making up recipes instead of following them
conquered my fear of rats by beating a dead one with a metal pipe in the backyard of a house we used to rent