Happy Birthday to me...

Today is my 47th birthday. Not such a big deal...but then, it kinda is. I am now the same age (minus two months) as my mother was when she left this earth. And it kinda changes your perspective to know that by the end of the year, I will have lived longer, seen more, experienced more...than she ever would.

In honor of this, I want to include a quote from my favorite series that discusses exactly this same thing....


The Fiery Cross
(c) 2001 by Diana Gabaldon
HC edition, pg. 558
Chapter 58 Happy Birthday to you



"Do ye ever think—" he began, and then broke off. "Think what?" I bent and
kissed his chest, arching my back to encourage him to rub it, which he did.
"Well . . . I'm no so sure I can explain, but it's struck me that now I have
lived longer than my father did—which is not something I expected to happen," he
added, with faint wryness. "It's only . . . well, it seems odd, is all. I only
wondered, did ye ever think of that, yourself—having lost your mother young, I
mean?"

"Yes." My face was buried in his chest, my voice muffled in the folds of his
shirt. "I used to—when I was younger. Like going on a journey without a map."
His hand on my back paused for a moment. "Aye, that's it." He sounded a little
surprised. "I kent more or less what it would be like to be a man of thirty, or
of forty—but now what?" His chest moved briefly, with a small noise that might
have been a mixture of amusement and puzzlement. "You invent yourself," I said
softly, to the shadows inside the hair that had fallen over my face. "You look
at other women—or men; you try on their lives for size. You take what you can
use, and you look inside yourself for what you can't find elsewhere. And always
. . . always . . . you wonder if you're doing it right."

His hand was warm and heavy on my back. He felt the tears that ran unexpectedly
from the corners of my eyes to dampen his shirt, and his other hand came up to
touch my head and smooth my hair. "Aye, that's it," he said again, very softly.
The camp was beginning to stir outside, with clangings and thumps, and the
hoarse sound of sleep-rough voices. Overhead, the grasshopper began to chirp,
the sound like someone scratching a nail on a copper pot.

"This is a morning my father never saw," Jamie said, still so softly that I
heard it as much through the walls of his chest, as with my ears. "The world and
each day in it is a gift, mo chridhe—no matter what tomorrow may be."