(Photo: Rudi Halbright)

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Look how young we look… Look at my hair, that’s my natural brown.

Look at my hair. It was so full and thick.

Mine too, long and curly and brown.

Look at my arms. I’ve got to start lifting weights again.

Look at our skin.

All that natural collagen.

Remember that night, when we stayed up all night and danced and then watched the sun rise in the desert?

Wow, look at us. We’re kinda hot.

And so young…

Scene: My husband and I are looking through photos on the computer. Photos from 2000 to today. We’re looking for something in particular but we keep getting sidetracked, distracted by how much younger we looked… when we were 15 years younger.

It’s kind of funny. We can’t help but laugh at ourselves as we do it. Realizing the cliche of longing (just a little) for plumper skin, flatter abs, hair free of grays, a few less cracks in our souls.

And yet… We’re never going to be as young as we are right now. We laugh that in 20 years we’ll be doing the same thing, except the photos we’ll be looking at will be from 2015.

There are definitely times when I would love to be able to dance all night again. I’d even love to dance for a few hours somewhere besides my kitchen, to music louder than what comes from my iPod speakers.

But what I couldn’t do then that I can do now is dance in my kitchen with my daughter. And she’s so fun to dance with. And in between moves she grabs me to give me huge bear hugs.

And that man, the one I met in the desert, we made her together.

I think about all we’ve done together since we met more than 16 years ago. Everything we’ve lived. What we’ve created. What we’ve lost. What we’ve built and rebuilt. The love we’ve brought into our family. The children we love and help to grow. The grownups we have become and the way we help each other shine.

We were just beginning, then, in those photos. And God willing, we’re still just at the very beginning.