Birthday

This morning I began the day on my porch, with a cup of tea, toast and Wendell Berry. He read aloud a poem from Leavings to start the show, and I think it was very fitting for my 25th birthday. I'll post it below. For the rest of my day: A bike ride to the farmer's market to buy food for tonight's risotto, planting things in the pots sitting on my porch, sitting in the sun and enjoying a glass of wine with a few friends. I like getting older.

I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don’t think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforeseen debilities. Time is neither
young or old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse. And the clouds
—no mere measure or geometry, no cubism,
can account for clouds, or satisfactorily, for bodies.
There is no science for this, or art either.
Even the old body is new—who has known it
before?—and no sooner new than gone, to be
replaced by a body yet older and again new.
The clouds are rarely absent from our sky
in this humid valley, and there is a sycamore
that I watch as, growing on the riverbank,
It forecloses the horizon, like the years
of an old man. And you, who are as old
almost, as I am, I love as I loved you
young, except that, old, I am astonished
at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.