Life Flows By Year By Year, Decade By Decade

 

Barbara

Barb

Barbie

Barbs

Mrs. Barber

Mommy

Noni

The names of this face that I still smile with have evolved over a lifetime. 

Only my dad, grandpa called me Barbie.

Nobody was allowed to call me Babs.

But my favorite of names have to be Mommy and Noni.

Our sweet smiles remain the same as our face transforms from a wee one to sixty something Noni.

What I love about looking back on the faces of me over my life is the people who are in the photos with me.I have never been much about liking or sharing pictures of myself. But looking at my expression in this picture creates a story of who I was when someone snapped this photo. 

Incredible that today I have a great-grandson about the same age I was here. Life has been good to me. It is evident in the photos that are in photo albums or photos waiting to be put in an album. My mom was great at capturing moments with a camera. I wish I was better at remembering to document with a lens. 

Today I am only weeks away from my sixty-eighth birthday. Luckily, Susi will always be older than me. But I know that seventy will be here in a blink of an eye. What I hope is that I can somehow focus on the freedoms that this age give me rather than the fact that my friends and I are in our last decades or years of this life.

 I miss having my kids at home but I love the quiet mornings where I don’t have to get them ready for school.

I miss teaching my kiddos at school but don’t miss the politics of school life.

I miss playing on the merry-go-round but I love reading in my hot tub. 

It is a sweet time of life with Ronnie B and I enjoying trips to visit family or swim in the Bahamas. Time with friends just chatting casually sweetens my day. What I love most is having others who share common  memories that we can laugh about. There may be a liar’s dice story that I need to take to the grave. But most stories throughout my life have been shared on this blog. I have been reading back through my fourteen years of blogging to get content for my podcast. What a gift I gave myself when I began writing more regularly. Not only do I love the words but the fact that writing them was such therapy to me. 

So here I sit waiting to babysit a seventeen month old whose mom is my grandgirl. God is good to allow me to be all the names and faces as time continues to unfold. 

In Him,

Joyful