What do you make of this?  My grandparents house, circa 1930 in the northern reaches of Vermont.  Not the charming villages of Vermont that you go sightseeing but a blue collar town with a very questionable long-term source of jobs.  They both died in the 1980s and the house was sold and is now being lived in by an old woman.  A cousin recently went into the house to discover it has been kept like a museum - all the artwork, furniture and trinkets that my grandparents had are in their same places.  And here is this woman, living by herself, surrounded by decades of old stuff that isn't her own.

I have to imagine that it is fear of change for her.  She moved in, settled down and told herself that she would change things when she had a chance - but then she started to get more and more comfortable by the day.  And it started to feel as if changing anything would disrupt her life so much that it wasnt' worth it.  And now, she just lives her life with what I suppose are her things now.

After we had our first child, things settled into a routine.  Our family grew to three and everything was fairly manageable.  Our first was growing healthy and happy and we weren't overwhelmed.  Why upset the apple cart?  But then, we woke up two years later and said hold on - didn't we want to have more than one child?  We need to get on that! I was rapidly approaching my mid-30s and all of a sudden the clock ticked inside my head like a gong on a clock.