"Do you want the children's menu?" the hostess asked, flicking her eyes over my girl on her eleventh birthday. It seemed awfully small for The Cheesecake Factory, a place with a menu that sells advertising. We took it, anyway.

When we got to the booth, the little angel informed us she is no longer allowed to eat from that menu, as it is for children ten and under. We told her she probably wouldn't get arrested or anything, but she seemed proud of the fact that it was LEGALLY AGAINST THE LAW for her to order off that menu.

I sat there scarfing down the tiny bread that comes in the little basket and is just enough to kick your blood sugar into high gear but not enough to take the edge off your hunger if you ate a really little lunch because hello, you were going to The Cheesecake Factory, her birthday favorite and grandfather of America's portion-size issues, for dinner, and while I tried to make myself chew instead of just swallowing the doughy goodness whole, a sea of children's menus flashed before my eyes.

Hot dogs

Chicken fingers

Cheeseburger sliders

Cheese pizza

Macaroni & cheese

Applesauce

Fruit cup

French fries

Scoop of vanilla ice cream

It's not that I'm nostalgic for the children's menu. It's full of food that we all pretend is disgusting and then lick off our kids' plates after we finish our salad and they leave half a perfectly good chicken finger for which we paid hard-earned money, dammit. I don't miss the little kid days, actually. She was adorable, to be sure, but when I look back at the pictures we took of that time, I can see the exhaustion in my face and remember the feeling of OH MY GOD I CAN'T PLAY POLLY POCKETS ONE MORE TIME OR I WILL SCREAM AND I'M NOT SURE I WILL BE ABLE TO STOP SCREAMING PLEASE GOD SOMEONE PASS THE ATLANTIC.

It's just ... that at some places, at least, it's no longer an option. Another milestone, so to say. You hear everyone say it and you can't believe it's possible at the start of the journey, but eighteen years really isn't that long. I was a senior in high school more than eighteen years ago. I've been married for almost fourteen.

My marriage can't even eat off the kids' menu.

As my daughter would say, *poof*. Mind blown.

I look forward to the next chapter of her life, even though I'm a little afraid of the teen years that linger not that far on the horizon, and OMG, middle school even closer. Thank God she still can't finish a cheeseburger. Pass that plate, sweetheart. I got your back.

Maldives dragonflies cross the Indian Ocean every year. They fly at 3,000-foot altitudes. They spend 3,500 km of that over the open ocean.

Dragonflies are less than four inches long.

---

The dragonflies can take four generations to make their migration, breeding in temporary pools of rain. Those pools might be there and might not when the dragonflies arrive.

I suppose they don't really know before they start, whether their children will make the crossing. Whether the rain will fall in time.

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Ever since I started running half-marathons, I understand so much better how far a kilometer or mile really is. Road signs take on new meaning when I can imagine myself running the four miles to the next turn-off: how long it would take, how I would feel at the end.

---

Yesterday I ran a little more than four miles without realizing it. The Runkeeper app made it look like I would just be tempo running for 25 minutes, period. I thought about giving up when I realized my mistake - that the app wanted a warm-up and cool-down mile on either end. I wasn't in the mood to run very far. I kept going because I really wasn't concentrating on the how far part of it. I was trying to go fast.

When I got done, I thought about seeing the sign posted four miles before my usual interstate turn-off, how very far four miles always seemed when I just wanted to get home.

It's better not to know, not to see the whole distance before you start.

It's better not to wonder about the rain.

It's better, I suppose, to just cross the ocean.

OMG, it was so cold. Our car thermometer read 27 degrees when Beloved and the little angel dropped me off. I made my way down to the corrals, where we had to wait an extra 15 minutes or so because the traffic jam coming into the single entry-point was backed waaaay up. I was not happy with the delay, as that meant I spent my time stamping my feet and jumping up and down, wasting valuable energy.

I had some layer issues. When I did my shake-out run the day before, it was 18 degrees and windy, and one pair of running tights just wasn't enough. So to this half-marathon, I wore:

• 2 pair of socks (one compression, one wool)
• 1 pair of compression shorts
• 2 pair of running tights (one normal, one fleecy)
• 1 running tank bra
• 2 wicking long-sleeved shirts, one with a hood
• 1 long-sleeved tee
• 1 thin waterproof windbreaker for when it started snowing
• 1 neck gaiter
• 1 hat
• 1 pair of thick running gloves
• 1 water bottle (I always carry my own water)

I was okay except for my feet in the corrals. My right foot toes started to go numb before they released us, which was troubling. Then FINALLY we started. As we were taking off out of that single entry point, I saw swarms of unhappy runners walking in from the line of cars still waiting to turn in. I don't know if those guys went ahead and ran or not, but they probably did because a) it was a chip race, so the only thing that mattered was when your chip crossed the lines and b) I saw some incredibly fit-looking people finishing a half hour after I did. As I ran, I felt happy I was not one of those late people.

About two miles in, there was a steep hill. They had a start and finish line for the King and Queen of the Mountain. I saw some people really going for it, and I thought they were crazy to blow so much energy so early in the race. I, of course, also started out too fast, but at that point, I was so cold I had to move as fast as I could to avoid freezing solid to the highway.

When I got up the hill and then down the hill, I noticed something. I was ACTUALLY OVERHEATING. I felt awful. I stopped to try to get my neck gaiter off, and it got tangled up in my headphones and then they popped out of my ears and the little special ear thingies that keep the headphones in my ears fell off. I started cursing a blue streak as my cold fingers struggled to get the ear thingies back on and the headphones back in my ears. I ditched the gaiter and took off my hat and gloves. I have no idea how long that all took, but long enough. I was PISSED. 

After about three miles with no hat (my hair, oh my bedheaded, sweaty hair! so sexy) and no gloves, I started to feel better. And then I had to pee. Not terribly, but the way you have to pee when it is 27 degrees and you have been running for an hour. A port-a-potty appeared, and I remember how bad it was in my last half when I had to pee at the end of the race, so I sacrificed another 90 seconds or so to peel down four layers of bottoms and do the business.

Wearing more clothes than Shakira owns and really, this is so not flattering.

I actually felt more gross at this point than I expected to. I think the overheating thing was not good, especially in the face of it being below freezing. I was still pretty hot, so I stopped again to remove my armband/phone, take off my windbreaker, tie it around my waist and put my armband thing back on. I was chewing two sports beans about every 10-15 minutes at this point, because any time I run for more than an hour I start to feel dizzy if I don't get some nutrients. I fought off side stitches for probably the middle 5-6 miles, but thankfully they never went full-blown.

Despite all these issues, I really enjoyed the course. I saw a few hawks and falcons and the water and woods were pretty. I have biked around this area plenty of times. It's nice and flat for much of the course with some very slight rolling hills. The area around my house where I train is hillier than this pretty course was.

At the 10-mile mark, there was another hill, and I decided to walk through the water station and up most of the hill. My theory was that I would gun it down after and not stop again until the finish (hubris). I saw a sign that said, "Mom, Run faster, I'm cold." I thought that was really sweet. I was almost on top of MY OWN DAUGHTER HOLDING THE SIGN when I realized Beloved and the little angel were watching me walk my ass up the hill. I was so embarrassed. But the sign was awesome.

I rallied after seeing them and slogged my way through until mile 11, when my feet went completely numb. It is hard to run with numb feet. I was seriously concerned about turning an ankle and being left for dead on the highway. A few times I had to stop and stamp my feet to try to get some feeling back in them. All around me, people seemed floating along effortlessly. This hurt. I trained my ASS off for this race. I have never worked so hard. But the end result felt the same. I was dying, and mile 12 was way more walking than I wanted it to be. I kept willing myself to run faster and more, but my brain totally checked out when my feet went numb. I wish I could write a glowing review of my performance, but really I was pretty embarrassed and sad that I didn't beat the time from my first race. It was the EXACT SAME TIME. How does that even happen? But it was.

After I finished, I had to find Beloved and the little angel, who had abandoned the car and were walking toward me from where they had to park out past the 8-mile mark (the course doubled back on itself). I almost started crying when I realized my phone was dying and I didn't know where my family was and I was so, so cold and soaked in sweat and wrapped in a piece of mylar. The feet I still could not feel were attached to legs that could only hobble, and y'all, I felt forty in every bit of my bones.

But then! I saw them! Beloved gave me the outer shell of his ski coat and the little angel asked me why I was wrapped in a balloon and we walked for twenty minutes to get back to the car. At the side of the car, I took off the windbreaker and the long-sleeved cotton tee and the two long-sleeved wicking tees and it seriously felt warmer standing there in a tank top that was not wet. We climbed in the car and the heat was on and it was the best moment of my life when the heat hit my cold fingers.

Then the little angel asked to see my medal and Beloved said he was proud of me and then later Pa said he wished he had the gumption to do something like that and I remembered it's not about whether I'm getting faster or whether I look cute in my running clothes.

It is about staying in the game of life for as long as I can, as strong as I can. And I finished. Thanks to everyone who offered encouragement here and in social media and on Runkeeper. It really does help.

Last night I made my best friend meet me twenty miles closer to my house than she originally intended because on Saturday, I broke my ass. Okay, I don't know if I broke it, because I can't get in to my doctor until Thursday, but I fell backwards on tile and bounced, so let's just say it together: OW OW OW OW OW. Also, I really hate driving right now.

I tell you this partly in an obvious bid for sympathy (hello, I'm supposed to be training for another half-marathon, not trying to type with my butt on three pillows) and also partly to maybe explain the following, in that about 80 percent of my brain is thinking about the pain in my butt at all times, leaving only 20 percent left to process actual thought.

Her: Have you friended your fifth-grade teacher on Facebook?

Me: What? Why?

Her: She's, like, awesome on there.

Me: My mom was friends with her ... sister? Cousin? That's crazy, since they didn't live in the same town or anything. What was the teacher's name? Martha?

Her: Mary.

Me: I think her cousin's name was Martha.

(pause)

Me: Oh, wait. Maybe that was Jesus.

I can't resist going outside on summer nights.

No matter how old I grow, on summer nights, I am seventeen again, pressing my face to the thick air, listening to the tree frogs and the owls and the cacophony of insects that create a din where in winter there is only silence and cold. The cold sometimes creates a sound that is not a sound, but more a feeling.

The trees rustle where the boughs meet fifty feet above my head. I wonder who planted these trees or if they planted themselves. I wonder if the trees will still be here after I am gone from this place, and I am certain they will be. The trees don't care about my business. They'll offer shelter and shade to anyone and no one.

Summer nights convince me that I could walk away into them, walk for miles into their thickness and here on the edge of town I could disappear into the thickets where the deer live and the coyotes howl, pressing against the edge of the house rows. They ignore our presence and continue to be wild at the edge of it.

Once in high school I took a walk late on a summer night along the edge of a highway and out in the fields farmed by my relatives, I saw a million fireflies light up all at the same time. That they did that every night, that they still do that every night while I am sleeping or watching Netflix continues to center me and remind me that my little melodramas bloom and fade away like fireworks against their continuing thick summer night sky.

On summer nights, my favorite authors sat and thought and looked at similar fireflies and wrote their words, and sometimes I write some words, too, watching them explode against the screen before they fade away into the raging river of social media.

And I am struck by the mediocrity of my finest hour, and also comforted by it, because I am only just beginning to discover what so many more humans have known before me.

At my aunt's funeral last weekend, I remembered a documentary I saw about elephant mourning. Elephants are very intelligent, and when one of them falls, the herd gathers around it and touches it, sometimes moving to bury it under tree branches. They have even been known to do this for people. As I sat in the pew with tears streaming down my cheeks, I mourned my aunt who has been gone as I know her for years, taken by Pick's disease, but if I had a trunk, I would have raised it in respect for the woman I knew.

When I am gone, I would like an elephant funeral on a thick summer night. 

Outside, listening to the tree frogs and the owls and the night creatures going about their business, I realize again how silly my ego really is. I can strive to scratch against the surface that is history, but ultimately a wayward star can erase not only me but every human who came before me and would come after. It's a scary thought, but also an oddly comforting one. I am all of it; I am none of it. The only thing that matters, ultimately, is how I treat people while I am here.

When we're gone, people don't remember so much what we said or what we did, but how we made them feel. We store that feeling with smells and tastes down in the animal portion of our brains, so much that when I cracked open an old book of nursery rhymes my grandmother used to read me, I heard her voice and initially thought I was being visited by a ghost before I realized this was my brain at work, my memory associating her gentle tenor with the words on the page.

On all summer nights, if I am alone and the air is right, I am seventeen and there are millions of fireflies hovering above the cornfields. I am seventeen and I will be someone and I will conquer the world and people will remember my name.

In mid-April, I ran a half-marathon. A few weeks later, I developed a stress fracture. Since then, I've been building back up from that. I had a boot for two weeks, then I got out of the boot and was only able to run a mile and that mile gave me pain, so I cut back to an even more conservative plan that had me building up from three cycles of 9 minutes walk/1 minute run to today's final six cycles of 5 minutes walk/5 minutes run. After a rest day tomorrow, I should be able to run three miles for the first time in more than a month on Friday. I want to get going again. I've signed up for another half-marathon in November. I'm tired of babying my feet.

Except now my calf hurts. And my friend and co-worker Diane just got diagnosed with a blood clot. And all I can think about is that this a blood clot, even though when I used my foam roller, my calf was ridiculously tight, and there's every reason to believe I've been overcompensating on that leg whether I realize it or not. And when I found a lump in my breast it hurt so bad the day before the mammogram and not at all the day I was cleared as "normal." And the lump in my leg throbbed until it came out and I discovered it was a harmless lipoma and no other lump in my leg (and there are many) hurts because I assume now they are all lipomas.

So I'm going to my doctor tomorrow morning to have what is in all liklihood a muscle sore from being really worked again after a month or so of lighter workouts checked out to make sure I'm not going to drop over dead. Because that is where my anxiety goes -- straight to dead. Rational? No. Logical? No. But if I let myself think about a blood clot for more than five minutes, my chest goes tight and I feel like I can't breathe, and then I wonder if it's a panic attack or a pulminary embolism from my blood clot that I probably don't have. And even if I do have one, Diane has one and is most certainly not dead, and I won't be dead, either, because I will take the medicine and everything will be fine.

So far, the tightness in my chest has not been a pulmonary embolism. It is totally anxiety, which can be a tremendous bitch.

But I'm going to the doctor, more for my anxiety disorder than for my calf. This is what I do now, at forty. I do not try to convince the anxiety disorder that things are no big deal. I just go get facts, and most of the time, things really are no big deal. But I no longer wait around to see if the cat throwing up means anything special or if the lump in my breast is a cyst or breast cancer. I just go and let a professional person tell me what is the what.

Then, on Friday, assuming there is no blood clot, I'm going to RUN.

Y'all, I'm having a blogiversary this year, the big ten. I even started this blog in May 2004. I got all sappy and made a big slideshow of ten years of my daughter and me and this blog over on BlogHer today. Please check it out!

The other day on the radio I heard that song from Pretty in Pink. You know the one. 

I touch you once.

I touch you twice.

And the kill shot: You always said we'd meet again, someday.

I'm back to revising THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES and nineteen years old again in my head, and that line might summarize eighteen, nineteen, twenty and twenty-one for me. A series of leavings. Wondering if we'd stay friends, stay in love, stay in fucking touch. 

Watching people on whom we hung the future smile and wave and wander off until the phone calls and letters became memories and "do you remember" conversations and awkward introductions of people who were now our new everything. 

And feeling -- or at least I felt -- so betrayed by others and my own self that feelings that were once so intense could flame out so quickly without daily fuel. Surely there must be something wrong with her or him or them or me that we could have nothing left to share but the past? Something that maybe should be punished?

You always said we'd meet again, someday.

But after the first leaving of high school and the second, third, fourth and fifth leavings of each successive college class graduating and then all the leavings of friends picking up their bags and loading up their cars and moving on with their lives in different cities or states or countries, after the stay-at-home leavings of friends getting married, getting divorced, having children, changing jobs and moving away, after all of these leavings, each one gets less personal. 

I learned to say "goodbye" without having to say "see you again soon." Sometimes it's just "goodbye," and that's okay. It doesn't mean there was a betrayal.

Maybe that's why when I hear that one song from Pretty in Pink, I'm nineteen years old and hurt again by those words that I no longer attach to any one person but maybe all of them, all of those  people who left, even me.

You always said we'd meet again, someday.

I got a bit of sunburn today, rolling around in my 1997 convertible, top down, radio up, DMV waiting to get duplicate titles on the sailboat and trailer I've owned for eleven years and sold tonight. I remember my best friend's father writing out a bill of sale on a slip of paper, selling Puffer to me for a dollar and a tow away on a brand- new trailer my brand- new husband and I bought. We brought her home from Iowa, worrying over every bump on I-29 until she rested safely in Kansas City. I sailed her, and I taught my husband and daughter to sell her. I was so proud to call her mine, to be a person who learned to sail and then actually kept doing it.

We always said we'd sell when we went a season without raising the mast, and last summer was it.

He travels a lot. The slip and trailer storage is expensive. We're ready for something easier.

My daughter was sad as we watched Puffer's new owner haul her away, still bearing the stickers of my lake and the Iowan lake I grew up on. She's headed to Long Island Sound. May she have a good life. She was made the year I was born. I like to think we both have a lot left in us.

Tonight I press my cheek to the patch of skin on my arm where I missed with sunscreen and feel the heat of forty summers on my skin. My body reacts to the sunlight, always. Just like Puffer.

I wonder how I'll get on the water next, but I have no doubt I will. I 'm happiest on the water, not in it or near it, but floating upon it, where the sun can still kiss my skin. Where I'll feel the heat of forty more summers yet.