… if you’re me and you’re not wearing any makeup per usual and you’re on the windy 43rd floor balcony of a Waikiki apartment building and you play the ukulele and you wear glasses and you could use a haircut and you have been on seven continents and you are a writer and a musician, dammit, and you take pictures with your cell phone and you just lost your dad and you live in Seattle but you think about moving to Hawaii all the time and you blog and you like Indian food and mochi and you have about one quarter of a decent manuscript for a nonfiction book on your hard drive and you really should write the rest of it and you drink too much coffee and you’re holding a plane ticket for the Yukon at the end of January because you’re the kind of person who goes to the Yukon at the end of January and you have a handsome European husband and you are on at the very tail end of your forties and sometimes you wake up in the night thinking about Angkor Wat or Antarctica and you think, good god, how did you get from such a gawky nerdy kid to this, is this really your life, it is not free from angst or pain but it is a good life, one so much better than you could ever have imagined.

This is what 49 looks like if you’re me. Which I am. Very much so.