One More Trip Around the Sun -- 70 Years, 840 months 3,652 weeks 25,567 days 36,817,200 minutes 2,209,032,000 seconds

By Peter Bowden


He woke to the smell of dust motes dancing in sunbeams, a golden, forgotten incense that had perfumed every birthday morning since memory began. The air was a tapestry woven from the scent of old paper and the distant, murmuring sigh of wind through ancient trees. Outside, the world hummed with an invisible, electric current, a quiet symphony of cicadas in the noon-warm grass and the faint, sweet decay of summer. Another year had passed, not loudly, but like a bird moving through high branches—seen only if you were looking. He didn’t count years much anymore. They gathered on their own, stacking like stones in the garden wall. It wasn't a number so much as a whisper on the wind, a faint echo from a time when the world was a carousel of blazing, untamed colors, now softened, like a watercolor left too long in the sun.

His fingers traced the cool glass of the window seeing not merely the garden beyond, but all the springs and autumns that had blossomed and withered there. Each pane held a ghost of a younger self, laughing, dreaming, running through long-gone rain. The ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall was no longer just time passing, but a heartbeat, deep and resonant, counting out the precious, irrecoverable moments. He felt the weight of them, not a burden, but a rich, warm cloak woven from every forgotten sunset, every whispered secret, every sweet, sudden joy.

And in that quiet accumulation, a new kind of wonder settled. Not the frantic, breathless wonder of youth, but a softer, more profound awe for the persistent magic of simply being. The lines around his eyes were maps of old laughter, his hands marked by the memory of countless greetings and farewells. He was a vessel filled with light and shadow, memory and longing, moving through a world perpetually reborn, yet forever familiar. The coffee, steaming in his mug, held the taste of all his yesterdays, and a silent promise of the beautiful, unknown tomorrows, each one a new page turned in the grand, luminous book of living.



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