Thursday, August 20, 2009

It appears I suddenly quit with updating this blog each day, but I have not forgotten it is here. Summer is not quite over yet, but almost, and so I will end this blog with this one last post in honor of a year finished...and a birthday.

It’s a disappointing thing, sometimes, to realize that when you move far away from home the only thing you can’t leave behind is you. Sometimes we want to leave our families, forget our situations, and wipe the slate clean. What we fail at times to realize, however, is that deep down inside what we really want is not a clean slate, but a brand new one—a shiny fancy one with special places to hold the perfect writing utensils, the intricately carved wood frame buffed and finished in high gloss, and the built-in stand on the back so it needs no help being propped up. But as clean as the slate can be, it can never be replaced, and the memory—the scratches, the scuffmarks, the worn edges—it contains can never, by any means of our own, be erased.

I was not unaware when I left my home that I would always be where I always am. I may, however, have been a bit too naïve in hoping the slate could in fact be wiped clean with no remnants left of what I wanted to be my old life. But I’m learning our life is our life and as much as it evolves, it does not simply start over. There is not old and new but simply then and now, and even that can get a little muddled. It’s difficult when the same things show up over and over and you just want to know that someday those things won’t be there anymore, meanwhile, let’s keep the good stuff.

Tomorrow is my birthday, which, consequently, marks one year of being in Kentucky. As I finish out my twenty-eighth year of life and stamp it with the number twenty-eight for approval, I end this year and begin the next one with a sigh of recognition that the time to look deep into the very being of who I am and why I’m here has come. I did not have unrealistic expectations that Kentucky would magically sweep all my weaknesses and flaws away (which isn’t to say I wouldn’t have been happy if it had). And so I find myself in the very place I need to be, which is always the place where we’d rather not. I think of my sweet friend Sarah from back home who always gives her new birthday year a theme and I wonder what mine might be if I were to follow suit. The Hard Stuff, perhaps? Or maybe something a little lighter—I wouldn’t mind.

Tomorrow marks a new year in my life and a new year in Kentucky. What it will hold, I can’t even guess