When I was just out of graduate school, I taught middle school kids for two years in a program where another tutor rubbed me wrong. She was forty and supremely confident; she and her husband had made what was likely a ton of money on Wall Street and now lived in Vermont. She laughed that they had spent $100K renovating a bathroom — more than I later paid for a house and 100 acres.
At the Memorial Day Parade, I met her family, with their two little boys. I was childless then, and longing for a baby. She had a dog on a leash. One son had contracted E. coli. The deal was, she said, I told him we would get a dog if he didn’t die. So, we got a dog.
Part of me wishes I could ruefully look back at my younger, snarlier self (who cares how much someone spends on a bathroom, anyway?) with humor and lightness. But really, the crotchety side of me is immediately recognizable — if anything, ground deeper, more articulate, wiser for the wear.
Stony Soil Vermont 
Can we have coffee? I see a transcendence of values over time. And in those moments, a nutshell of the political climate today. Also my personal discomfort in wondering about my immediate association of a 100K bathroom person moving to rural Vermont back then with national immigration today. Lots to ponder.
Coffee? Definitely. Plenty to ponder…. I sometimes wonder what happened to this woman and if she’s already redone that 100K bathroom. Perhaps it had a gold-leafed tub?
I love how you observe, reflect and knit together past and present. That’s the gift of our age. The gift we didn’t have in our 20s and 30s.
That’s a nice way of thinking about being 50 🙂
I must admit that I love the “crotchety” side of you! XO