Now she saw the flowers for what they were; tiny blossoms that had forced their way through a foundation of dry cracked stone.
Or when she thought towards the future, now she was more inclined to see herself sitting alone in a condominium writing late into the night drinking cold white wine snuggled between brown fleece blankets and in bare feet with non-painted toenails.
Whereas before she would have seen and old woman sitting with her husband in a Christmas photo surrounded by a dozen or so grandchildren, all locking ice cream cones on a summer-beach cabin vacation.
There wasn't a tremendous amount of disappointment in this new understanding of her life; in fact there was even a bit of relief since now more than ever she was the creator of her own destiny, fabricating a future for herself. She had even started to dream faintly of having a cabin on a small island and owning a one-person sailboat.
But a part of her also felt crushed; it would pain her, for example, to receive birth announcements from college girlfriends who had just had their third or fourth child; and she saw these friendships that had one been the core center of her life, that had defined who she thought she was, as fading, somehow slipping away.