This past summer, my new 4-person-family went on a road-trip through New Hampshire and Maine. We spent 5 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.

29-36

“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.

“29-36,” he explains “29 is the age women always they are (want to be) and 36 is the age you actually are.” He smiles, proud of his clever memory trick.

“I don’t want to be 29,” I say thinking back to 7 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. “29, the age I want to be and 36, the age I am.”