This past summer, my new four-person family went on a road trip through New Hampshire and Maine. We spent five days in Bar Harbor, home to Acadia National Park. It was beautiful (although not as amazing as Yellowstone National Park, a road trip we did two summers ago and I still haven’t posted pictures.)
Nonetheless, the cottage we rented was adorable and it didn’t have a traditional lock-and-key scenario to get in the door. Instead it had a numeric keypad on the door, where a magical combination of digits would yield an open door: 2936.
“I have a way to remember our keycode to enter our vacation house,” my boyfriend told me the day we arrived for our week respite from Manhattan’s heat.
“Twenty-nine, thirty-six.” He explains, “Twenty-nine is the age women always they are (want to be) and thirty-six is the age you actually are.” He smiles, proud of his clever memory trick.
“I don’t want to be twenty-nine,” I say thinking back to seven years ago, a time much less happy than now.”
But as I accidentally locked myself out of the house later that night, I confronted the stainless steel keypad at the door with a sudden “oh shit” moment. Then I calmly repeated and typed into the keypad. “Twenty-nine, the age I want to be and thirty-six, the age I am.”
