Aging

I"m getting wrinkles.

I'm not sure if they just appeared after 2 years of 3am Starbucks mornings.

Or maybe it's from sleeping on my face - I've read that you're not supposed to sleep on your stomach because it smooshes your face.

Well, it could be because I've always been a person that is outside a lot. As a kid, I was always playing one sport or another. In the summer my sister and I spent our days riding around the neighborhood with our Barbie Dolls and Nurf guns on our scooters. We would catch craw-dads in the rivers with hot dogs and sticks and drag them home in a paint bucket only to dump them back out into the stream the next morning as they had died overnight and were stinking up the garage. Every day that my parents had off of work, they were taking us out of doors. Camping, hiking, skiing, playing all sorts of sports, riding bikes to Dairy Queen, driving with the windows down, etc... A lot of my summer jobs through college were outside: Sea World vendor, camp counselor, working at the orphanage in kenya, etc... And now as an adult i'm outside a lot still. Every weekend, Landon and I try to fill our days with sunshine, rocks or snow.

Or maybe it's in my genes, to get wrinkles. With my red hair and freckly skin, I'm pretty sure i'm just more sensitive to sun damage. Maybe that's it.

Or....maybe it's just my time. Maybe time has claimed my youthful years. Yeah, I am feeling older lately. Whenever Landon has a birthday, it actually makes me feel older than when I have a birthday. We're in our late twenties, which is nothing to cry about. But I don't feel that close to 30. We were looking through the church directory of small groups to find one that would fit us perfectly. "Young Marrieds" is what we were looking for. And then I realized that we aren't necessarily newly-weds any more....and we're not actually that young either. Landon insists that we still fit in that category, but I'm just not so sure. And one of the things I really enjoy about skiing is meeting people. Last week when I was skiing alone, I talked with a couple of middle-aged men. Nice guys. I initiated the conversations (of course), with something like, " wow, the visibility is crappy today, isn't it?" One of the men responded to me in the way I hoped he would. He was very friendly and told me that I was doing a good job skiing (after I told him that this was my first season on the mountain) and had more of an uncle-ish response - he's old and friendly and wonderful. The other guy, I asked what time it was, and he got the  wrong idea. He actually thought I was hitting on him! Which threw me for a loop. I had to evaluate that whole experience. I wonder if I'm old enough now that guys my dads' age don't respond to me like someone that could be their daughter, but as a young woman who might be "interested".

Well, whatever the reason for the wrinkles, I'm not gonna cry about it. It just took me by such surprise, since I haven't really had wrinkles before. And I'm getting them other places: my forehead, and especially around my lips...

I should ask my grandmother about wrinkles. Since she told me growing up that freckles are angel kisses, I wonder how she would console me these.