I'm 15 for a moment
Caught in between 10 and 20
And I'm just dreaming
Counting the ways to where you are...

15, there's still time for you
Time to buy and time to choose
Hey, 15, there's never a wish better than this
When you've only got a hundred years to live

-Five For Fighting, "100 Years"

"I need not belabour the point that to retain our childlike opennness does not mean to be childish. Only the most mature of us are able to be childlike. And to be able to be childlike involves memory; we must never forget any part of ourselves. As of this writing I am sixty-one years old in chronology. But I am not an isolated, chronological numerical statistic. I am sixty-one, and I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five, and... and... and....

"If we lose any part of ourselves, we are thereby diminished. If I cannot be thirteen and sixty-one simultaneously, part of me has been taken away."

-Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Art and Faith

Last night I sat knitting on the sofa in comfortable silence, much as a woman twice my age might have done. I gazed wide-eyed at chrome sculptures of cars and softly brushstroked landscapes and black-and-white photographs, with the eyes of a six-year-old child, and the memories and perspective (however limited) of 22 years. And I stayed up waaay into the night reading a mystery novel - which is something only impractical college students do. Right?

I've only got a hundred years - or maybe less - to live. I hope I can live them with the varying perspectives of all the ages I've been and all the ages I will be. Somehow, I think, that will make me a richer woman.