50.

I’m a few days out from my 50th birthday, and although I did absolutely nothing to celebrate other than sit outside and watch the sky during the meteor shower, I woke up this morning feeling grateful.

Grateful for the calm that has been consistent in this home for the last two years. Grateful for the structure I’ve managed to build into my life over the last year.

And grateful that I get to do what I love every single day.

Poptart is even so much calmer with a structured life - something I know she needed, especially because she can’t see. Before, there was no rhyme or reason to walks or meals. She was overweight and unhealthy. I had become overweight too.

It’s crazy how much a little structure can make a person feel more secure. Less like the rug can be pulled out from underneath at any moment.

I’ve said this before, but I’ve made peace with my past failed relationship and the decades I spent with someone with whom there was never real compatibility.

The impact of staying in something that was all wrong wasn’t good for either of us, but I don’t believe things went down intentionally. We were too young to commit to something long-term, and I didn’t have the life experience to differentiate between the very normal anxieties and uncertainties that come with transitioning into independence and adulthood and mental health issues that need professional attention. Hell, I was on antidepressants. I just assumed everyone was having these internal battles.

The difference was that one of us was aware of an internal struggle but was in denial about it.

As I started building routines and making changes that changed my own chemistry - working out, martial arts, running - I eventually got to a place where I was able to come off antidepressants. My ex, on the other hand, was self-medicating. Indulging in things that weren’t actually addressing the issues, but distracting himself from them, only for them to resurface more intensely down the road.

 Eventually, it became a pattern. Something I would recognize immediately now and remove myself from.

But back then, I wanted to be supportive. And I was doing it in all the wrong ways.

The beauty of life and of the years we live, is that they bring lessons you can only learn through experience.

So here I am.

And proud of myself for making it this far.

I’ve done a lot of internal work. I’ve let go of the hard feelings attached to the past. And I have absolutely no idea what the future holds for me. I do still envision growing old with a companion someday, but I’m in no hurry.

I have my dogs. My little slice of heaven. And work that swells my heart to the point that tears come easily from being overwhelmed with so much love.

I cry a lot these days.

My fellow hikers have witnessed it. The inmates know all about it. It’s a running joke with my business partner.

I don’t know if it’s hormonal or not, but I know it’s not because I’m sad. If I had to put the feeling into words, I’d say it’s this overwhelming sense of butterflies with a little lightning mixed in while standing beneath the most beautiful double rainbow you’ve ever seen. It comes from being in awe of how much my life has changed and how in love I am with it. 

I get to live day to day doing the things that feed my soul after spending decades working for “tha man” and getting nothing from it other than money. I allowed myself to be taken advantage of at home and in the workplace. I felt like a prisoner most days. I made a lot of money and tried to buy peace for myself.

And luckily, one of the things I bought was this old farm.

It has truly been the thing I needed.

I just wasn’t able to find the right circumstances to actually enjoy it.

That time is now.

Happy Friday!

xo

-s

a tale of two pennies.

This morning I woke up crying. I was literally awakened from sleep, as the sun was coming up at my usual time, already crying. And it seemed like I had been crying for a while. 

I couldn’t fully remember my dreams, but bits and pieces started returning. I remember it being more like I was watching my dream happen to me. Like third person point of view. There were moments in my dream where I was watching myself grieve for  all the times I didn’t speak up for myself sooner. There were strange characters too. people I couldn’t make sense of being in my dream at all.  people I wouldn’t expect being there, seeing my sadness, almost pulling it out of me. Some were people from my past who are no longer in my life for whatever reason - whether it was death or distance.

I think all of this may be connected to a conversation I had yesterday with a client I see weekly. She’s deeply intuitive. She’s got a few decades on me. She says she’s lived many lives, and honestly… I believe her. She carries a kind of wisdom and insight that, in my experience, has proven to be true.

Yesterday she was holding something small between her fingers after our session. something she’d picked up off the street and began telling me a story about her dad. She used to take him grocery shopping in his old age. Because his balance had become unsteady, she had him use a shopping cart to help keep him upright. One day, she turned around and saw him bent all the way over. She panicked. At his age, bending down was difficult enough, but getting back upright was even harder. When she asked what he was doing, he told her he had seen a penny on the ground and needed to pick it up. He had grown up during the Depression. To him, a penny meant something entirely different than it does to most of us now.

Then she told me something else. She said she knows things. Ya know… things. She told me that this particular thing we’ve been working on together, something involving her dog finding a more balanced emotional state, and her learning to feel more at ease because of it, is something she practices daily when I’m not there. And she said that even though her dad passed many many years ago, she knows he’s still around. She still asks him for help. She told me she had recently asked him for a sign that she was doing the right thing. That’s when she noticed the penny. Glinting on the street.

She looked at me and asked, “Do you ever call on your dad?” I told her I’d never really thought that I could. She said, “He’s always right here next to you. He wants you to still ask him for things.” I immediately broke down. Quiet but uncontrollable tears. She cried with me. And if I’m honest, it was the first time I felt like someone besides my siblings actually saw the emptiness I still carry without my dad. And then a flood of memories came back.

Moments that felt random at the time, but maybe weren’t so random at all. The most recent happened just last week.

A new friend - someone who knows almost nothing about my dad other than that he died several years ago - handed me a smashed penny. He’d made it by placing a penny on the train tracks near where he works. The moment I saw it, I thought of my dad. I told him my dad had been a welder for train cars and used to bring me smashed pennies when I was a kid.

What makes that moment harder to ignore is the timing. It was the day after Father’s Day. My dad had already been heavy on my mind.

I don’t know what you believe about signs, or grief, or what happens after people leave this earth. Truthfully, I’m not even sure what I believe. But my client said that penny was my dad making a real effort to let me know he’s still here.

And I have to admit… Part of me wants to believe her. Because the timing felt too specific. Too personal. Too familiar. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it was comfort. Maybe those two things aren’t always as separate as we think. I don’t know.

But this morning, as tears came before thoughts, I found myself wondering if grief and love ever really leave us at all.

Maybe they just change form. Maybe sometimes they glimmer on the street or come the form of a smashed penny from a new friend. 

xo

-s

the tree

Yesterday I got motivated to tackle those giant limbs in the front yard that fell a few days ago in the storm.

I can’t remember if I wrote about them here, but I mentioned them on Instagram when they came down.

I actually put a tiny dent in the project on Wednesday, but it was also a beautiful afternoon for my bestie to come over and have a couple of yard beers, so we did that instead. I even got her on the little lawn tractor for some farm fun.

Yesterday was my long day.

Thursdays usually are. I have two hikes back-to-back, then I come home to walk my own dogs, and after that I have private dog-walking clients. Most Thursdays I get home completely spent. But yesterday I looked out at those fallen limbs and got a sudden surge of motivation. 

I started wondering all kinds of things.

How much of this can I actually do with my little chainsaw? Where am I going to put all this brush?

What if I get started and realize I’ve taken on more than I can handle? (this happens more than I’d like to admit)

And then I just started doing it.

One branch. Then another. Then another.

The more progress I made, the more I realized I wasn’t doing it because the limbs needed to be cleaned up.

I was doing it because I needed to know I could.

I spent years as the only woman at my last place of employment. I had to prove myself over and over again. And I did. If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that story. If you don’t, well, it eventually became public record and now I work for myself. 

But standing out there in the yard yesterday, sweating and dragging brush and cutting limbs, I realized this wasn’t really about me or those limbs. 

It felt like I was doing something for every woman who has ever looked at a hard thing and immediately thought, “I can’t do this. I need someone to do it for me.”

Now don’t misunderstand me. Do take help when it’s offered. Accept kindness. Let people show up for you.

But standing there alone on nine acres looking at that giant mess in my front yard, was both intimidating and also seemed like an opportunity to empower myself. I went inside, put on my boots, my gloves, picked up whatever tools I had. And just started working. 

I know that I can’t do it all.

I don’t own a chainsaw big enough to handle the largest pieces. At some point I’m going to need help, and I’m perfectly okay with that. I’m not so stubborn that I refuse help from a man just to prove a point. That’s not strength. That’s just foolishness. 

But knowing that I can handle what I can handle with the tools I already have and knowing that I don’t immediately fall apart when something big lands in my path is what I needed.

-s

what does it all mean?

I think when people find themselves on the other side of a failed long-term relationship, everything feels a little strange. You’re carrying the wisdom that only comes from that specific experience, but also the bruises that came with it. Part of you wants to protect yourself. Part of you wants reassurance that people don’t have hidden agendas. Part of you wants to move slowly enough that you can trust what is actually unfolding rather than rushing ahead and filling in the blanks with hope, fear, or assumptions.

It’s a delicate balance. On one hand, you understand how easy it would be to become jaded. To decide that everyone is the same. To assume disappointment before giving something/someone a chance. On the other hand, you’ve seen what that mentality can do to a person.

I’ve watched bitterness become a lens through which everything is viewed, and I know that’s not the life I want for myself.

I feel like I’m stepping into this new chapter, milestone year (hello 50!) with a clearer head than I’ve ever had before. Maybe that’s one of the gifts hidden inside failure. When enough things don’t work out, you’re eventually forced to stop looking at life through the stories you’ve always told yourself and start seeing things as they actually were.

Perhaps it is because of failure. Perhaps it is because I’ve had enough time to sit with the lessons and let them settle. Or maybe it’s because, for the first time, I’m looking at relationships, friendships, and life itself with fresh eyes. Not with a heart filled with what I hope something becomes, nor the fear of what it might become, but a growing willingness to simply let things reveal themselves in their own time.

And if you’ve read any of my posts from the last year, they’ve all been kind of pointing toward this sentiment, even when I didn’t feel like I could clearly articulate it. I am finally learning that peace doesn’t come from controlling outcomes, but from trusting yourself to handle whatever outcome arrives. This realization was really hard for me to actually get to - my stubbornness hindered this for far too long…

I know there are stages of grief, and I know it’s okay to move through them at whatever pace feels right. I also know that I carry both the gift and the burden of hope. Hope has allowed me to stay in unhealthy situations longer than I should have, believing that if I just worked harder, waited longer, loved without conditions, or understood more, things might become what I needed them to be.

But hope is also what carried me through the darkest parts of this journey. It is what allowed me to believe there was something better waiting on the other side, even when I couldn’t yet see it.

The difference now is that hope no longer feels attached to a particular person, outcome, or story. It feels attached to life itself.

Healing is not easy. It’s easier to convince yourself you’re doing the work when you’re really just repeating old patterns in a slightly different form. Real healing requires honesty, accountability, and a willingness to make different choices even when those choices feel uncomfortable.

It’s fucking hard. And it’s taken me far too long to get here than I’m comfortable admitting. But at the end of all that, it feels right to finally be at a place where I can simply allow things to unfold as they will.

xo

-s