a new decade

The lights are still strung across the backyard, and while traces of the fiesta remain here and there, the cake is but a memory.  Hello forty, here I am.  The neighbor was kind enough to say that he would have thought thirty... and though I smiled graciously, I am owning forty.  What else can you do, really, when your daughter is just weeks away from eighteen?   I would not trade a smile or laugh line for all the world... and even the worries that have etched their marks, have contributed to who I am now.  Lessons and laughter and living... I will bring them along into this next decade of me.  Yes, I will own forty... because as it has been said, it is not the years in your life that count, but the life in your years.