They say it’s your birthday / It’s my birthday too, yeah

30 years.  3 decades. 1,565.32 weeks.  Even more days, hours, minutes, and seconds.   30 years of heart beats and breaths.  30 years where smiles have outnumbered frowns.  Laughter has been abundant.  Tears have been rare.  Cities have been explored and oceans have been swam.  Miles have been walked, ran, and flown.   Friendships forged and loves lost.  There have been high hopes and big dreams alongside stinging disappointments and slight blunders.

While the past 30 years (especially the previous 5+) have seemingly flown by with little resistance (and I am sure the next 30 will do the same)…I am honestly and wholeheartedly  looking forward to this upcoming decade.  I would be lying if there haven’t been moments in the past year where I have slightly freaked out about turning 30…they weren’t moments of comparison between my position in life and that of others.  We all lead different lives at varying paces.  However, do you ever feel like you are just tumbling along like a rogue sock in this big dryer called life?  Yeah…moments of feeling lost in the shuffle have made me apprehensive about turning 30.   I guess I always assumed 30 year olds didn’t tumble.  30 year olds knew what they wanted.  They walked confidently.  How naive my younger self was.  While I  don’t feel like I am tumbling about, but have gracefully graduated to gentle stumbling…I think learning how to confidently walk is what awaits me/us in our 30’s.  And you are silly if you can’t find the joy in that.

Birthdays have a tendency to be celebrated with layered cakes and multiple scoops of chocolate ice cream and rivers of hot fudge and mountains of whipped cream and showers of sprinkles.  However, after I recently had a rather heated (ha!) text message conversation with a friend over the best cake flavor (chocolate versus spice), we both realized that cake was our 4th favorite dessert.  Who argues over their 4th favorite dessert?  Pies, cookies, and brownies are favored over cake…all day, every day.  So, on this 30th birthday of mine…there will be no cake, but  a dessert I have made no less than 5 times in the past 3 weeks.  A favorite of mine?  Perhaps.

The simplicity that is a crisp is why I favor this dessert in the spring/summer.  A few cups of fruit that is hanging about the house, tossed with some sugar, a thickener, and perhaps a squeeze of a lemon or lime…topped with a quick crumble and in no time you have a dessert that will please everyone and anyone.  Young and old.  Friends, coworkers, and family. 

Plus, when you have a friend who supplies you with bundles of rhubarb because it grows in abundance behind her house ( I give thanks to whoever owned the house prior to her … we would have been fast friends as well) and when the strawberries are sweet and delicious … my mind can think of nothing else besides strawberry and rhubarb.  Rhubarb and strawberry.  It is the only thing I have been pumping out of my kitchen.

So, while I enjoy a bowl of warm strawberry rhubarb crisp and say adieu to my roaring twenties…I am giddy and anxiously awaiting what my 30’s will  have in store for little old(er) me.  Cheers!