“Days go by. I can feel ‘em flying like a hand out the window in the wind…”

When I hear those Keith Urban lyrics in my ear, I know I’ve reached the halfway mark in my morning walk. Today, the words grabbed my attention as I thought about how quickly the days do fly by. Maybe getting older makes a person realize life is more of a sprint than a stroll.

Perhaps, it is an approaching anniversary that has me thinking about the passage of time. Now, this isn’t a regular anniversary, like the date of a wedding. It is more the marking of a turn in the road that took two lives in an unexpected direction.

I’ve told the story before about how my husband and I happened to cross paths one Saturday night in late September. It is a tale of two people who had no idea the surprise life had in store for them.

It is also the story of a woman, me, who was smart enough to trust what landed right in her lap rather than questioning it to pieces. That was not an easy thing for me because Lord have mercy I love to question and analyze things to the heavens and back again. There might be a little bit of a control issue lurking in there somewhere.

Anyway, I got off track. What hit me this morning is how quickly the years passed from that September Saturday to the one coming up this weekend. I know it sounds a bit cliché, but where does the time go.

As I passed the old pier down by the lake, that was the thought in my head. I stopped for a moment picturing the two people sitting on that pier years ago. It was a beautiful fall day and we were in a perfect setting to enjoy it. I remember talking and laughing, feeling a sense of rightness.

I smile recalling those two who were just beginning to find their way together. For me, it was finding someone who brought out the best in me, someone who encouraged me and showed me with his actions that I never had to doubt his faith in me. He also made me laugh, and that’s important if a relationship is going to survive all the other surprises life brings.

And life did bring surprises and challenges. Again, it all seems like it happened at lightning speed looking back from where I stand on this hot fall morning. That we made it through all the twists and turns is certainly a tribute to stubborn determination on both our parts. Developing the ability to shut up and walk away for a while also helped.

I finished my walk and headed inside. As I passed the pictures hanging in the hall, I stopped to look at one of my husband and me taken not too terribly long after we met. Boy, we look young and I have lots of big hair. Could it really be more than 30 years since we smiled for the camera?

I am thinking about that as I wash my sweaty face and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The hair isn’t big anymore, but there is more gray in it. My smile is the same, only there are now wrinkles around the eyes and across my forehead.

There is a dusting of gray in my husband’s red hair too. I laugh at the thought that we have managed to age each other quite gracefully.

Yep, the days, heck the years, fly by like a hand out the window in the wind. Life keeps moving us down the road at breakneck speed. As for me, I’m grateful that I’ve been flying down the road with the man I met on that September Saturday night 32 years ago.

Hopefully, we’ve got more interesting roads to travel, more years stretching out ahead of us, more of that-time-we-met anniversaries to celebrate as our days fly by.

 

Nancy Blackmon is a former newspaper editor and a yoga teacher.