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Still Feel 25, Math Says Otherwise
My mom always told me that the day I was born was the perfect fall day. I was born in a tiny corner of Vermont, and in her telling, the leaves were at their absolute peak, the weather was beautiful, and the world outside looked exactly the way Vermont is supposed to look in late September. I obviously don't remember any of it, but she told me the story enough times that I can almost see it anyway, and for most of my life I never really thought about the fact that the memory belonged to her, not to me.
This year I have thought about this memory a lot.
I am fifty on the autumn equinox, and maybe it is simply because I'm feeling sentimental about reaching a milestone birthday, but there is something almost suspiciously perfect about that. Equal light and darkness. The beginning of one season and the ending of another. A point of balance and transition, with the world changing around us whether we're ready for it or not. Somewhere in Vermont, fifty years after my mom looked out at those perfect leaves with a brand-new daughter in her arms, autumn is arriving again. And somehow, fifty is arriving too.
For most of my life, fifty wasn't a real age to me. It existed somewhere out there in the vague and impossibly distant future, belonging to people who were unquestionably grown-ups and certainly not to me. Then thirty arrived, and forty, and forty-five, and suddenly forty-nine, and with each one the distance between me and fifty got a little harder to ignore. You can joke about it, bargain with it, stare suspiciously at the calendar and wonder how the hell the arithmetic worked out this way, but apparently none of that has any effect whatsoever on time.
There's no stopping it.
It's here.
The funny thing is, I don't feel fifty. I'm not entirely sure what fifty is supposed to feel like, but I apparently expected some internal notification to arrive informing me that I had reached it. Instead, I still feel fundamentally like myself, which makes me think of George Strait's "Troubadour." I've heard that song countless times, but the older I get, the more I understand what he means when he sings, "I still feel 25 most of the time."
I get it now.
It isn't really about wishing I were young again. It's about realizing age accumulates around you without erasing who you've already been. I don't want to go back to twenty-five, I worked too damn hard to get from there to here. But that woman is still part of me, along with the thirty-year-old and the forty-year-old and every other version who got me to this particular threshold.
When you're young, fifty seems like an age by which all the major questions will surely have been answered. You'll have become whoever you're going to become, established the life you're going to live, and reached some mythical state called settled. From this side of it, that idea is hilarious. I have answers to questions I didn't even know to ask at twenty-five, but I also have entirely new questions, and some of them are much more interesting.
Fifty was always going to be a lot. I knew that. What I didn't expect was how much this particular birthday would make me think about the people who aren't here to see it, or how much sadness could exist alongside the very real excitement I feel about whatever comes next.
When I look backward at fifty years, I don't see only the people I've lost. I see how extraordinarily lucky I was to have had people worth missing this much in the first place. I see a life already filled with friendships and places and adventures, with ridiculous decisions and unexpected turns, with people who walked beside me for a few years and others who walked beside me for decades. I see people who loved me, challenged me, irritated me, made me laugh, gave me somewhere to belong and, in ways I probably won't ever fully understand, helped create the person who is sitting here wondering how the hell she turned fifty.
These people walked with me for part of my life, and although some of them aren't here anymore, they left things behind in me. Stories. Habits. Lessons. Ways of seeing the world. A certain kind of courage. And, occasionally, some excellent advice about how to grow older.
Momo left me a particularly good one.
When Momo reached somewhere around sixty, she announced that she was going to become cantankerous. She was going to live vividly, do the things she'd always wanted to do, and raise a little hell.
I love that energy.
In fact, as I hit fifty, the more I think Momo may have had exactly the right idea. Somewhere along the way we're handed this strange notion that getting older should mean getting smaller and more sensible, that there comes a point when we're supposed to stop asking what if? and simply be grateful for what we've already had.
I am grateful. Profoundly so. But gratitude and wanting more life aren't opposites.
I can appreciate every extraordinary thing that has already happened to me and still want to see what's around the next corner. I can be thankful for the life I've lived and still want a bigger, stranger, more colorful one ahead. I can miss the people who aren't coming with me and still keep going.
And I have another woman in my family who made a pretty convincing case that I shouldn't start winding things down just yet. My great-aunt kept traveling until she was around ninety-eight years old, which, from where I'm currently standing, makes fifty seem practically adolescent.
When I think about her, the question changes. Instead of asking how much of my life has already passed, I find myself wondering how much might still be ahead of me. There are places I haven't seen, people I haven't met, things I haven't learned, risks I haven't taken, stories I haven't written, and entire versions of myself I haven't met yet. If I'm fortunate enough to inherit even some of my great-aunt's longevity and curiosity, I could have decades of discovery still ahead of me.
Maybe fifty isn't halfway done.
Maybe it's simply the point where I understand enough about myself to travel differently.
And lately, I've been thinking a lot about where that traveling might take me, and, strangely enough, where I might finally decide to put down some roots.
Because somewhere in the years since my mom died, I lost my sense of home.
For most of my life, I think I assumed home was something permanent. Even when I lived thousands of miles away, there were places I could point toward and know that some part of me belonged there. There was the farm. There was the cabin. There were places where everyone gathered, where you walked through the door without knocking, knew where the glasses were, knew who would probably be sitting where, and didn't need an invitation because your presence was already assumed.
I didn't understand how much of what made those places home was actually the people inside them, and sometimes when you lose people, you lose places too.
The buildings may still exist. The roads are still there. You could type an address into a GPS and drive directly to the same spot, but that doesn't mean you can go home. When the people disappear, the geography can stay exactly where it was while the feeling of home disappears completely.
That realization has left me more unmoored than I expected.
Savannah, where my dad is, doesn't feel like home (though I love to visit). The place where I live now doesn't really feel like home either (let's be honest - I loathe the wind). I just live there for now.
That's different.
For the first time in my life, I don't really have a place I can point to and say, "That's home." Maybe that's why I keep finding myself thinking about Vermont.
And let's be honest, Noah Kahan's odes to my brave little state haven't helped either. I saw him in concert this summer. In the middle of the show, road signs I grew up with started flashing across the screen behind him. Places I'd driven past a thousand times as a kid, up on a jumbotron in front of thousands of strangers who had no idea what they were looking at.
I knew exactly what I was looking at.
That's when it hit me. If it hadn't been a solid plan before that moment, it certainly was after.
Vermont truly has always been inevitable. I have spent a lot of my adult life trying not to go back. But I don't think I can ignore her siren call for much longer.
I spent a month at the farm that spring, after I picked up my little camper in Buffalo. We were having dinner one night, at the table my mom had bought from her favorite Vermont woodworker, and Vermont came up the way it always did with him. He told me that if he and my mom hadn't had the farm, they probably never would have left Vermont. He talked about how special it was, and I don't know whether he knew something I didn't or whether he simply understood me better than I realized, but he asked me the same question he always did.
When are you going to go back to Vermont?
I don't remember exactly what I said back. Probably something light, something that let the moment pass without really answering him.
At the time, I don't think I understood how much those words would stay with me. I do now.
After my mom and stepdad died, I didn't only lose them. I lost the farm and the cabin and those places where everyone gathered. I lost the spot where I got married and the place where I scattered my dogs' ashes. I lost physical anchors for family and friendship and memory, and I think some part of me has been searching for that feeling ever since. For a while, I thought the answer might be another huge trip, something big enough to match the way this next chapter feels, and I let myself dream about where I might go and what kind of adventure could mark turning fifty. But every version of that dream eventually ran into Penny and Luna. I couldn't imagine leaving them behind for that long, and more importantly, I didn't want to. Somewhere in thinking through all of that, the question began to change. Instead of wondering where I wanted to go, I started wondering what I wanted to build, and maybe even what I wanted to leave behind for whoever comes after me.
The money my stepdad left me was his and my mom's, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could think of few things more meaningful to do with some of it than buy a piece of land in Vermont. Not because I believe I can go backward. I can't rebuild the farm or recreate the cabin, put everyone I love back around the same table, or somehow reconstruct a version of my life that has already passed.
I don't want to.
What I want is to take what those places taught me about belonging and build something new from it. I want it to become a legacy, not just an inheritance. I want another gathering place. Somewhere the people I love can come and stay too long, where there are dogs underfoot and too much food and people laughing in the kitchen. Somewhere that collects stories. Somewhere friends know they have a place. Somewhere that, over time, becomes less about the land or the building and more about the people who know they belong there.
And I want Penny and Luna to have summers there too.
I don't let myself do the math too often, but it's always somewhere in the back of my mind now, the way it is for anyone who loves a dog long enough. Whatever time I have left with them, I want it to include a place like this. Not more tight schedules and short walks. Real summers. Swimming in water that's actually cold. Running loose in the woods until their legs give out. Rolling in something they absolutely should not roll in, and not caring because there's no rush to get anywhere else. Dog bliss, plain and simple.
Not a return.
Something built forward.
And perhaps that's what my stepdad was asking me without either of us knowing it.
When are you going to go back to Vermont?
He asked me so many times that I can still hear him saying it.
Fifty years ago, my mom held me in a tiny corner of Vermont on what she remembers as the perfect fall day. Now she and my stepdad are gone. What they left me might let me stand on that same ground again, not to get back what I lost, but to build something that was never there before.
There's something else I want from that land, something that goes beyond everything I've already said.
Three of my dogs' ashes are in the creek they loved, on the farm in Owego. My mom is supposed to be there too, with my stepdad. But when the time came to spread her ashes, I wasn't invited. I have no idea if her wishes were even honored. And the saddest part is there's nothing I can do about it.
I'm still working out how to hold that. It's not something I expected to have to grieve on top of grieving her.
Maybe now.
Maybe now means answering him. Maybe it also means something I couldn't have said out loud until this year: I want a place where I never again have to wonder if I was allowed in the room. Where nobody decides for me whether I get to be there for the people, and the dogs, I loved. Where being invited was never a question in the first place, because it's mine, and so the invitation is automatic. Every time. For everyone I choose to bring there.
I can't undo what already happened. I can't go back and be standing there for her. But maybe this is how I make peace with everything unresolved from my past. Maybe this is how I find my own peace.
I don't think this next chapter is about reinventing myself. Reinvention suggests that everything that came before needs to be discarded, and I don't feel that way at all. Every version of me served some purpose. Some were braver than I realized at the time. Some were surviving. Some were trying desperately to get everything right. Some made decisions I wouldn't make now. Some stayed in places too long, left other places too quickly, loved people, lost people, screwed things up, figured things out and kept moving.
They got me here. I don't need to reject those versions of myself, but I also don't need to keep being all of them. Maybe I can simply say thank you. You got me here. I'll take it from here. That feels less like reinvention and more like evolution, letting go of some of the things I once believed I needed to be and becoming more comfortable with whoever is underneath them. The question isn't really 'Who am I supposed to become?' anymore.
It's 'Who am I becoming?'
And for perhaps the first time in my life, I don't need to know the answer before I start.
Because my future self isn't just an older version of the person I am today.
She's someone I haven't met yet.
I love that idea.
I don't know what she'll care about. I don't know where she'll live, what she'll have built, which stamps will be in her passport, what she'll have learned to let go of, or which completely unexpected thing will have changed the direction of her life. I hope she's a little more fearless. I suspect she'll be a little more cantankerous. I hope she lives vividly. And if I've learned anything from the women who came before me, I hope she is still curious enough to be wandering.
I don't need to decide who she is.
I get to meet her.
Maybe that's what fifty actually feels like to me. Not arriving. Not being finished. Not finally having all the answers I assumed grown-ups eventually received.
It's standing at the equinox.
Light and darkness. Grief and gratitude. What I've lost and what I still have. The people who brought me here and the people I'll meet farther down the road. The girl born under those perfect Vermont leaves and the woman who may someday sit on a piece of Vermont land that doesn't belong to her yet.
My mom isn't here to tell me what the leaves looked like fifty years ago, but I know the story because she told it to me enough times that it became mine. Momo isn't here to grow more cantankerous, but I can raise a little hell on her behalf. My stepdad isn't here to ask me again when I'm going back to Vermont, but perhaps I'm finally ready to answer him. And my great-aunt gave me a pretty good reminder that fifty leaves plenty of time to keep moving.
I am still curious. I still want to see things I haven't seen, build things that don't exist, change my mind, discover who I'm becoming and find out whether there really is a more cantankerous version of me waiting somewhere down the road. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up, and at fifty I'm beginning to think that may be one of the best things about me.
I'm still wandering. But now I'm building something to wander home to.
If you know a place, a piece of land, something that could become that home, tell me. I'll be back in Vermont next summer.
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