Sometimes you have no choice.  Someone dies.  You can’t pretend it didn’t happen.  Denial does not work with death, unless you’re willing to go insane.  Slowly, you adjust.  You fight, you rail, you curse, but you find a way to be in the world without the one you lost.  It sucks.  No one wants that kind of change.  It is forced, and unwelcome.

A change of scene.  Sometimes just the thing.  A little trip somewhere, a visit to an old friend.  This kind of change is nice, and can be easy, and easeful, fitting in with your regular old rut of a life.  You feel changed, just a bit, refreshed or maybe just seeing things a little differently, without upending your whole life.  We like that kind of little change.

Gradual change is a mother fucker.  Improving eating habits, what a bore.  Going to bed earlier, must mean you’re getting old.  Smiling more, really?  I have to smile more?  Who says?

We like to be able to change our minds.  It’s nice to suddenly see things differently, unless you enjoy being stubborn, insisting you’re right when you know you’re wrong.  It’s not so bad to concede gracefully.  It can be a relief, and might make it easier to smile more.

The seasons change in their own sweet time.  My front lawn still has a foot of snow.  We have a lot of shade.  It is April and the lake is still almost completely covered with ice.  When it gets warm that fucking ice is going to go, fast.  That is a change to get excited about.  A few days of spring and then it will get hot and muggy.  Enjoy the change.

I chose the theme of change to push myself to change my writing habits.  Yet now a month of writing in April is becoming a habit.  Still, it’s a change from resisting writing for all the dumb reasons writers use not to write.  Tired.  Busy.  Insecure.  What have I got to say anyway, really.  All that shit.

It feels good to curse.  I don’t curse all that much when I write, so it’s a fun change.  I get to feel a little naughty and bitchy.

And then there’s the relentless march of time.  I am deep into middle age.  Fuck, I am old.  My oldest sister turned 60 and now my next oldest sister is following suit.  How the hell did this happen, we wonder aloud, often.  I am still trying to figure out what I forgot to do when I was young.  There were so many things.  I think that is the biggest mind fuck, feeling like the time got away and I didn’t do what I was supposed to do.  I tally up what I did do, and yeah there’s a list of accomplishments, but there’s always that feeling that I should have done something else, something more.  The big one, write a book.  That’s the one.  I am working on that.

And no doubt, when it’s finished, I will still have that feeling.  What is it I was supposed to be doing?  How did the time get away?  How can I change back to my young healthy fit body without going back to my young clueless tortured self?  Well, we fucking can’t.  We try to age gracefully, but change is a bitch and a mother fucker and all those great misogynist epithets that demean our mothers.  Yeah.

Change.