We’re expecting the birth of our fifth grandchild anytime now. So I wasn’t surprised to find myself thinking about February 29th as a prospective birthday. I think if I were about to be born and had any say in the matter, I’d choose to be born on February 29th – just because!
It’s intriguing to think you might celebrate only fifteen birthdays and yet have lived sixty years. But how would it work out actually? Would you have six decades of wisdom and experience and occupy the body of a teenager? Or would you be just as weathered, worn and weary as if you’d had sixty birthdays?
In his poem Evangeline – A Tale of Acadie, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow astutely uses winters and summers to tell us the ages of two characters, respectively old and young.
Benedict Bellefontaine, the wealthiest farmer of Grand-Pre,
Dwelt on his goodly acres: and with him, directing his household,
Gentle Evangeline lived, his child, and the pride of the village.
Stalworth and stately in form was the man of seventy winters;
Hearty and hale was he, an oak that is covered with snow-flakes;
White as the snow were his locks, and his cheeks as brown as the oak-leaves.
Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers.
Black were her eyes as the berry that grows on the thorn by the wayside,
Black, yet how softly they gleamed beneath the brown shade of her tresses!
Maybe counting birthdays isn’t the best way to measure the living of life.
Counting blessings would be better.
Being a blessing – better still!
