And then one day you wake up and it’s your 55^th birthday.  Which amuses you because that’s an awfully big number and doesn’t really feel like it belongs to you.  Although, clearly, it does.  If you think about your stories, you have to admit you can’t collect this many of them in 25 years or 30.

Your cats are somewhere on the periphery taking naps and the sun is burning off the dawn fog.  Your significant other is off serving breakfast to tourists—something you refuse to do—in your favorite beach town about 20 minutes away.  You’ll make the coffee cake and the gallo pinto for them, but no one is taking away your mornings.  They belong to you. 

You can make statements like that, stuff your hands in your pockets, and refuse to budge if you want when you’re 55.  Nice.

You feel an ache in your heart, though, because your husband was 55 when he suddenly got cancer and died.  You aren’t worried about repeating that yourself, but you are aware of the juxtaposition between how he felt on his 55^th birthday (perpetually exhausted) and how you feel on yours (tired from last night’s big catering job).  You miss him.  You can’t believe how you have learned to live without him, but you had to.  It was the best/only choice.

You don’t have any plans for today other than cooking up more coffee cake and gallo pinto for the breakfasts in the coming days, and you hope you finally sit down and write the blog post you‘ve been meaning to write.  You hope you think of something to say.  And as the temporada alta is unleashing over Guanacaste, you have emails to answer and accounting to do at your desk no matter who’s birthday it is.

They’re going to break ground for your house on Wednesday, si dios quiere.  And you really hope s/he does.   You are trying not to think about it because if you think about it, you might get too excited to sleep.  And you need your sleep.  You HAVE to be lucid and well-organized to keep your catering business going while building your house, both of which are happening in opposite directions of your physical location, which is in the middle of nowhere and you only have one car.  No pressure.  But you have to spend the night sleeping, not wondering (like you did the night before last) where the workers are going to go to the bathroom. 

So this is the year.  You are going to have your very own house on your very own lot, with your very own cats and your very own trees and your very own jasmine bushes.   You never minded renting and have always loved moving, but for whatever reason, you suddenly felt possessed to do this instead.  And you try to follow the voice inside your heart as best you can.

In the kitchen, you can hear the sound of the cat food bowl bumping on the floor which means that big fat sapo who lives under the refrigerator is stealing the cat food, and let’s just say it’s not the cheap kind.  It’s time to get moving. And you are very hungry and need more coffee. You think that although by “the world’s” definition of success you are definitely a bit of a failure, you have, in fact, succeeded at what you care about.  And you love knowing that if the 10 or 25 or 35 year-old version of you could see you now, they would be so very proud.