Old

"How old are you, Mommy?" Evelyn asked one day.
"Old," I said, knowing that at the tender age of 3, being 4 means she's quite mature, 5 is all grown up, and at 6, one certainly could drink/drive/get married/rule a country.
So, she pondered a bit on my response, and then, "TWENTY?" She said, in an exaggerated tone, as if that is an astonishingly "old" number and I just could not possibly be older then that.
"Yes," I laughed, "20."

I still remember coming home from school one day after we learned the names associated to the stages of life, and told my mother, who was then in her thirties, that she is approaching mid-life. Upon hearing this, her eyes went wide (not quite wild, but almost), she gasped and stuttered indignantly about how foolish my remark was, and how the label of being "middle age" is not going within 20 feet of her, never mind applied to her.

It's funny how the perspective of time changes as more time passed in our lives. I remember an hour being forever when I was little. Yet now, an hour is nothing. A bat of an eye. A turn of a page. Seasons come and seasons pass. A year goes by faster than I can acclimate to the new number shown on the calendar. My mother, who is now really in her middle age, told me that at her stage of life, 10 years is but a unit. If the passage of time was a little creak winding through sun speckled woods when we began our lives, its force gathers and speed increases as we travel through life until it's a roaring river rumbling by.

I don't know how many times people would stop to smile at the little ones, and warn me "they grow up too quickly." "I know," I always reply, for I really do feel it, even though they are still young. My newborn is about to turn one next month, and the older child did not hesitate to wave goodbye when dropped off at school. If I could, I would be bottling up everything I felt right now into jars to be smelled, tasted, and felt later. Unfortunately, memories don't work that way. I can only take pictures and video tape them whenever I can, trying to capture and archive forever what life is like now. And melt into their embraces every time I hold them, cherishing the feeling of their warm, soft bodies against mine.