I felt home-sick yesterday. The feeling doesn’t strike me often. I account this to the fact that I am as far away from North Carolina as possible. That is 3,519 miles away from a little place called Pikeville. I remember when Los Angeles felt like a ways away.

Change can make a person shake to their core. We can adapt or fall back into old patterns to cope. I no longer work as a dance instructor and feel this itch to jump back into the work despite the fact that I currently want to explore other avenues. I miss my closest friends, I miss my nieces and honorary nephews. I miss youthful dreams that gave me momentum to move forward. Every time has it’s season and one of my gravest mistakes is my belief that time stands still.

When I look at mountains, they stand tall for years and years. Beaches that I stood on decades ago feel just as they did before.

I spoke with my mom on the phone two days ago. I saw new lines shape her cheeks and it absolutely terrified me. Her mom passed relatively young as did my dad’s parents. If life is the natural order of things and my parent’s pass before me, their time to leave this earth creeps closer as the years keep burning by.

Where do I go from here? I hear the chantings of women from my past. Memories of them speak to me with a force of urgency.

One woman tells me how she never traveled to Scotland. Another woman tells me that while she loves her husband he never held her in his arms or actually changed anything that hurt her heart so. I am told about books never read or written, and dreams that vanished because there was no backbone, there was no belief in self. I feel their regrets well up inside of me as if they were my own and I ask myself, “Grace what will you regret most in this life?” “What is it you must do?”

My response, “Give mercy the way you wish to receive it, give grace, love those around you, learn this, come back to this, remember this first.”

Another thought pops in, “It’s a secret Grace, not meant for anyone else to hear but you know what you want and time is running out. The time is now.”

We don’t know our number but oh if we treated each day like it mattered because it does.”

My days matter, yours do too.