Sometimes, when you are forty, you wake up at five in the morning on Saturday, which happens to be your birthday, and your only real chance of the week to sleep in, and instead of feeling bitter, you write long, meandering sentences, which are extended even longer, through the use of strategically placed commas, because you are forty, and you can. Other times, when you are almost forty, you notice, while styling your faux hawk on the day before your birthday, the glint of several silvery strands swirling in with the dark brown, and you think to yourself, "Yes. This is what happens when you are almost forty." and you embrace the fact that the silvery strands are there to stay. When you are forty, you also care much less about what others think of you than you did when you were ten, twenty, or even thirty, and it is quite a liberating feeling, and actually also very nice. When you are forty, on that same early birthday morning, you lie in bed, typing a blog post on your husband's iPad, and you think about all of the wonderful people who have made appearances in your life, and how lucky and grateful you are to know or have known each of them. You are grateful, also, for the life lessons you have learned, and for literary terms and devices you have mastered, such as lovely alliteration. When you are forty, your children are consecutively twenty one, twenty, and eighteen, all adults, and all presently still living at home, and you are secretly happy about all of this because you like having cool people around, and your children are the coolest. You have Tuesday taco nights, as a family, at Rubios, where you all get to discuss college and jobs and plans for the future together, and you soak it all up like a parched desert sponge because you know these times are probably fleeting, and contrary to the lyrics of a very cool song, you know what you've got before it's gone, because you are almost forty. When you are forty, you admire your husband's smooth, bald head and get accustomed to his olde-timey handle bar mustache, which he waxes so the ends curl up like identical twin unfinished o's. You hold his strong hand anytime you go anywhere together, which is a lot, and you squeeze hard because of all you've been through together and your plans for the future are looking brighter and closer all of the time. When you student teach, when you're forty, it nearly pushes you off of a very high cliff, but those strong hands pull you back up and show you that the scenery is actually quite nice if you stop to take a look, and you are grateful that you have such good, loving hands to hold on to for dear life when you are forty, or nearly forty, and facing day after day of a room full of between thirty-nine and forty-three seventh graders at a time. When you are forty, you can do anything you set your mind to and you don't have to ask anyone's permission either. You can technically do this when you are twenty, but you feel less guilty and more sure of yourself when you are forty. When you are forty, you have some neat goals for the year like summiting Mount Timpanogos again this summer, taking Beulah on long rides as often and as much as possible, hopefully getting hired as an English teacher at a junior high or high school, and being lucky enough to set up your own classroom in the fall, making some home improvements, and possibly buying a nicer car so you can travel to far off destinations like sunny Saint George and Capitol Reef National Park more often. When you are forty, you have more of a life to look back on, and you feel pretty satisfied and content with the choices you've made and the life you've created so far. And finally, when you are forty, you wonder what the next ten years will bring, and what you will write about when you are fifty, which used to seem a long ways away.