overwhelming abundance

I had an experience this afternoon that shook me, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind.

My family spent the day here working incredibly hard (er, harder than anyone anticipated thanks to our rock solid clay soil) to help us start a deck. I went to Panda Express to get lunch for everyone. The nearby shopping center where the Panda is is a frequent panhandler haunt; it's pretty well trafficked and so especially in summer, people fly signs on the street corners there. I've never seen as many as today—from the man with a purloined shopping cart filled with belongings sleeping, exhausted, in the shade on a hill, to a life-worn woman with curly hair and a dusty vest.

But the people that really caught me off guard was the little family sitting on the median: a blue-eyed mom, two beautiful little girls, a six-week old baby in a stroller, and the dad, who held a sign saying that they had no job and needed to make their rent. I couldn't stop looking at them. Even if this was some kind of scam, I thought, you'd have to be pretty desperate to haul your whole family to a median and sit at cars drove past, drivers studiously averting their eyes.

I took them some lunch and some water bottles. The mother thanked me in heavily accented English. I went back to my car and cried. The car I sat in is our old car—old because we have a new, second car, one we bought because we could afford it and it was convenient. I drove back to our house that is so much space for our little family of three, whose mortgage payment we have never truly struggled to meet.

These moments in life truly pierce me. Sometimes I get caught up in scarcity mentality, worrying about retirement and braces for Kate and other far-off things that are so tangential compared to food and shelter. I feel paralyzed, wishing so desperately that I could somehow make a true difference for the myriad people I know and see who struggle.

There isn't really a point to this post. Nor is there a conclusion—except that life is sweet and life is bitter, and that I wanted to share the portrait of this family with you, because they are burned into my heart.

on turning twenty-nine for the first, and only, time

Today was my twenty-ninth birthday—for real. We celebrated well at my parents' house, with gorditas, five-layer Chinese bakery rainbow cake, and an impressive Mormon minibar (aka build-your-own Italian sodas). 

My dad teared up talking about how 28.5 years ago, when I was in the process of being diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, they found an outdated book in the library that said I wouldn't live past nine. Later, when the doctor gave them an official prognosis, it wasn't much better—nineteen. 

It's amazing to be a full decade past that, on the cusp of thirty. 

I found myself thinking tonight about my dear friend Kristi, whom I still miss daily, who died unexpectedly nearly a year and a half ago. She was a few years older than I am—already on the other side of thirty—but she, like so many of my friends, will not live to have another birthday.

Our culture has been subsumed by the cult of agelessness; adult birthdays are less joyful celebration and more occasions of dread, and millions of women walk around coyly saying they're turning "twenty nine—again." Every time I hear something like this I find myself wanting to grab the speaker by the shoulders and shake them. Don't you know how lucky you are? Don't you know never to take a single birthday for granted?

So here I am: heading into my thirtieth year of life, determined to live in gratitude, without taking these years for granted. I cannot wait to close out my twenties, to head into a new decade, to swim forward toward numbers I never thought I'd reach. 

And ten or twenty years from now, if I should be so lucky to still breathe, when my silver hairs have taken over, when you ask me how old I am, I will not be answering 'twenty-nine.'