Delayed Life

Leah
5 min readJan 13, 2022

Dealing with Changed Plans

I turned sixty early in December.

The original plan, made back in 2019, was to travel to Bali, to be someplace warm, possibly on a beach, celebrating my big day.

Then 2020 happened. That plan, plus the plans to travel to Guatemala in spring of 2020, went right out the window.

The day before my sixtieth birthday, my husband received his booster shot. So I spent the day of my birthday taking care of him. Had a very quiet day. Fixed myself left-overs for dinner.

However, I knew that was going to be the case ahead of time. I wasn’t disappointed, or even sad. Quite frankly, my husband getting a booster shot was kind of the best birthday present I could have, keeping him safe from the plague. (Thank you, science!)

I made us reservations that weekend at a really nice hotel in downtown Seattle — a room on the water with an electric fireplace. It was lovely. We had a cocktail downstairs in the lounge (also overlooking the water), went to a very fancy dinner, and just generally relaxed and enjoyed ourselves.

My family gets together every other year for Christmas. This was supposed to be an “on” year for us. I bought airplane tickets, reserved the hotel and the rental car, way back in June. everything was all arranged.

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Leah

Leah Cutter sold her first short story back in 1997, and continues to write and sell both her fiction and non-fiction. She supports herself with her writing.