April 3rd, 1998, 6:14 P.M.

April 3, 2021 | by Rachel Crittenden

The ice cream cake has been moved to the fridge, the dinner plates cleared away. A girl, now seven, steps out to her side porch and down a stone path to her faded blacktop driveway. No shoes. The driveway is long—always longer than she thinks—but she walks slowly, her feet picking up stray blades of brown grass from the cool gray ground. The sky is pink, the mailbox waiting.

This is my first memory of weather being beautiful. April 3rd, 1998. Though maybe not exactly 6:14 P.M., it was somewhere around that time, and, since that time, I have always equated my birthday with beautiful weather. Beautiful weather is, of course, subjective, and while (to me) it usually means a soft, clear day like that day in 1998, it has also meant fog descending on the flat-glass Passaic, rain smacking the sidewalks of West 10th Street, snow burying the cedar planks of my parents’ back deck. It has meant whatever the day would bring me, because whatever the day would bring me was, to me, beautiful.

Today was beautiful. It was very much like April 3rd, 1998, a whole twenty-three years later. And while I knew that I wanted to start this post with a description of that day, I had no way of knowing what this day would bring: Stray blades of brown grass on my own faded blacktop driveway. My family gathered—albeit social-distantly—on my own deck. Flowers and FaceTime from my boyfriend in North Carolina. Decorations and a Sweet Laurel carrot cake from my best friend in Boston. A long-overdue Zoom sesh with my other best friend in Israel, who also happens to share this beautifully-weathered D.O.B. (and who, fun fact, was in the same nursery at the same time that I was, though we didn’t formally meet until high school). Also, BONUS! My cat (Juliet) met my fur-niece (Atarka) and didn’t absolutely freak out, giving me hope that I may, someday, adopt a dog.

I’m thirty now. I am, apparently, a full-blown adult. Even so, I’m down to the very same wire I’ve been down to for the last twenty-nine years of my life. I promised myself that I would start this magazine on my birthday, and, gosh darn it, I’m doing it. Full-disclosure, though? This post is not what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be some sort of profound commentary on the meaning of birthdays. I wanted to write it weeks, months, ahead of time, then scrap it all and write and re-write it again. I wanted hours and days to fiddle with its commas and work through its syntax and agonize over word choice. I wanted to find a picture of me when I was, specifically, seven (#continuity), or, at least, when I was less-than-one (how it started/how it’s going, etc.). I also wanted to share it, all of it—the blog, the call for submissions, the instagram, the twitter, everything—by 11:11 this morning, so that I could spend the day feeling like a “big-time magazine editor” and (hopefully) racking up my email list. But I didn’t write this weeks, months, days, or even hours ahead of time. I wrote it today. I wrote it today, because it didn’t make sense to write it not-today. And I couldn’t find a picture of myself at, specifically, seven—or even at less-than-one—so, instead, there I am at four, standing in an airport parking lot and waiting, patiently, for my first-ever hot air balloon launch (and also my first-ever funnel cake). It isn’t what I planned, but I do take great comfort in the fact that the colors, at least, coordinate.

And, anyway, maybe all of this does mean something. Maybe it does culminate to some sort of profound commentary on the meaning of birthdays. Maybe the fact that it exists at all “means” that this new decade will be the end of my over-perfectionism and the start of me actually finishing things for me.

Maybe. Or maybe I’m just growing. 🌱