I have known for a long time where I wish my ashes to be scattered. I have walked that stretch of beach, a cove within Salsbury Cove, just a hop-skip-and-a-jump from The Ovens, probably a thousand times. Maybe I have walked it more than a thousand times in the 37 years I have known it. Known its curves, its predilection for purple seaglass and mussels with pearlescent shells; the pads of seaweed at low tide that you can walk across if you are careful to feel out the rocks beneath with your feet. The tiny island that forms just beyond the point that *sometimes* has a seal on it, but more often, you see the seals in the water, watching you.

I have walked this beach for years of my life. I learned to skip stones in the water there, have taken countless pieces of driftwood to burn in their Aurora Borealis colors in a campfire: I have found bricks and glass and jellyfish and dishes and seaweed growing, attached to same, for years and years. When I was ill 21 years ago, I still walked down to this beach, and back up the hillside walk to the house on the return journey.

It was on this beach 5 years ago that I set off lanterns with Cody into a winter sky: a night sky so clear and so full of hopeful wishes from the both of us. Drifts of snow lay before us on that beach and we crouched, almost in silence, making wishes as we sent wasteful lanterns off, over the water.

So, I have long known this is the place upon which I would like my ashes to be sprinkled, which brings me to my latest update: the newest iteration of the blog.

I am in the middle of downloading the old, and rediscovering the need to write the new. I am finishing an old project, and beginning two new ones. I am editing and rewriting the first version of this blog into a book:  a memoir. I have learned, through reading many memoirs over the past two years, that memoirs are best suited to a specific,  certain time, place, and theme. Hence, I realized that I finished one at the end of my last post, and here I am beginning a new one about the understandings one has at the cusp of turning 40. I now understand all the strange “over the hill” comments of my childhood. I am, for the first time, more than likely, closer to the end than to the beginning of my life. Now, being a person who became very ill and almost died at 18, a whole other aspect appears: I wasn’t sure I would make it this far. Thank you for accompanying me on this journey, wherever it will take all of us, each of us, individually: after all, it is a one-person journey as far as I can tell, despite all the lovely people who dot the landscape of our lives.

Happy New Year.