you could date me

My neighbor motioned me aside and asked, in a low voice, as if to signal we were talking confidentially, "Can I ask how old you are?" My eleven-year-old was riding his bike in wide circles around us and my other three kids were darting in and out of the street on various wheeled devices. "I'm thirty-four." I whispered back. Her response was flattering, "I thought you were like twenty-five."

This would mean she thought I conceived at fourteen, which would account for the whispering. Just in case my eldest didn't realize he was the son of a child bride. I assured her I had not and was not. The subject of conversation changed and was resumed at normal pitch.

Had my neighbor done some spying in my home, to search for clues about how old I might be, she would easily find some.







And a look at my wedding album definitely dates me. This was the first scrapbooking I ever did. Around 1999. Before the word "scrapbooking" was a multi-million dollar industry catering to moms like me who like to collect pretty papers. My favorite part of this page is the Idaho Falls Temple I made, cutting rectangles and pasting them into a pyramid... then handwriting "Holiness To The Lord" on it. My nine-year-old is more clever. Oh, and construction paper hearts. A must-have for time-representative memory books.


And still on my bookcase, a throwback displaying the passion the previous decade had for pine green: an ivy clock that hasn't had batteries in it since we moved here. I can't get rid of it. I mean I really can't. My mom had originally bought it for me, saw it in the D.I. pile years later, and rescued it.

Just so the nineties will be with us always,
on the hearth.


What dates you?