Growing older

It's odd, living most of your life in the same house. It's comfortable and familiar, yes -- but the flip side is that when things change, it can be jarring. Especially when you find out that they changed a while ago, and you just hadn't noticed; like a familiar face, you always use mental shorthand to represent it, and then something finally becomes so different that the shorthand fails and you see them for who they really are now, years later.

( Places age too. )