In the middle of the night in a little house in downtown Colorado Springs last month, I got out of bed to record the opening lines for this song.

Nathan and I were visiting our youngest, who had just completed his first month of his first year of college a thousand miles from home. We were new empty-nesters, and not entirely unrelatedly, I was a month away from turning fifty.

All this past year I’ve been forty-nine, a significant age in my consciousness, because my mother’s father died from lymphoma at that age. Singing to my bedridden Pop-pop is one of my earliest memories. I don’t remember him not being sick. Probably my oldest piece of jewelry, and the pendant on the necklace I’m wearing in this video, is a tiny owl with a small belly of turquoise. My grandparents went to Mexico to try laetrile treatments for his cancer, and they bought me this necklace there. Anyone who knows me knows I am generally not sentimental about physical objects; many items have not survived my minimalist purges over the years. But this pendant has stayed with me – kept for many years in my jewelry box, but in my year of being forty-nine, I wore it more often to call Pop-pop closer to mind and heart.

I was wearing the owl pendant when I woke up to this song’s opening lines in my head. The owl and I have now existed on this earth longer than Pop-pop did.

Fifty feels like a new place in life, and for me, remembering Pop-pop and experiencing my newly empty nest, it almost feels like a second life. I feel old because my joints hurt, my neck is wrinkly, and ’90s jeans are back in style (or maybe they’re not anymore, I don’t even try to keep up); AND I feel new because life as I’ve known it for the past twenty years is over and my imagination is spinning with possibilities and wide horizons (on a good day anyway, and I’m grateful to have many of those).

Getting older, I’m realizing, is just another journey of discovery. I’ve loved the ways I’ve mellowed – things that used to feel so paramount and get me all worked up, just don’t anymore. I’ve learned there are all kinds of people and many ways to live and be. Although I’m unquestionably an introvert, I’m finding how deeply I value everyday interactions with family and friends, coworkers and strangers.

I started rock climbing and keep improving at it. I’m getting more experienced at house maintenance because Nathan and I are predictably redoing a bathroom now that the kids have moved out. I discovered how much fun it can be to binge-watch a favorite TV show. I’m rereading War and Peace because Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in the darker months have always been my jam and not everything has to change.

All that to say, life is a gift and I’m thankful for all fifty years I’ve been given so far, and I’m excited and intrigued to keep on living all the time I have yet to receive.

My Pop-pop did not want to die
But the cancer didn’t care
He was forty-nine
When he drifted from time
In his favorite green velvet chair

I sang to him when I was three
Now I’m forty-nine
In another week
I’ll be turning fifty
and then leaving it behind

Hey-oh, where do the years go
Moving by so fast
They flow on with the current
Of future becoming the past

My daughter just turned twenty-two
My son’s almost nineteen
Seems like yesterday
I was watching them play
On a secondhand trampoline

They’d jump for joy for hours
Flip and flop and laugh
Now both my babies
Are bigger than me
And I’m still not used to that

Hey-oh, where do the years go . . .

Someday I may be listening
To my granddaughter sing
And I might recall
being so small
With a bright new world beckoning

I’ll hear the song, I’ll feel the love
That brought us both to life
I’ll forget my age
I’ll float on the waves
Of the River moving time 

Hey-oh, where do the years go . . .