i’m going to try something new: I’m going to try writing directly on the website. I’m 63 years old. I married at 22, had my first baby at 23. I didn’t follow through on some of the things I should have done before I had children— I cannot go back in time and fix that, but I can decide to go forward and not let the winds of chance blow me around as much as they once did.
I was married and a mother for all of my adult life. Give or take a year, that is a true statement. I have been a widow for nearly five years. I have had to do a great deal of adjusting in these past few years, but, by the grace of God and the habit of living, I am still here.
So far, I have survived Covid. So far. I don’t take this for granted. I realize that can change at my next trip to the grocery store. There is growing in me a new energy to get on with things. My children are all grown, and part of me hopes that maybe this year I might leave this house and find a nice little cottage to get going on the next chapter. I will need the cooperation of the health of the country and the economy to achieve this.
Some part of me would love to move away from the place that has been home for 30 years. As lovely as it is, I have felt like a visitor. This is not my native land. Not that I want to go back to NY, no, it is too crowded, too noisy, too much. What do I think I might like? I would like to be near trees and water and perhaps a mountain. I would like four distinct seasons. I have been saying that since we moved to Texas thirty years ago.
As much as I don’t like being cold, there is something wonderful about dressing in layers of coziness that is very appealing. Childhood memories of playing in the snow, pushing against a brisk wind, being spattered and chilled by a good rain storm, even getting miserably chilled and wet, for a time, is invigorating. You feel alive in these small challenges of nature. Your whole being gets a little exercise. A little victory; a little defeat. Alive. I might be romanticizing weather, but when most days are sunny and warm, you might be surprised at how much you miss a good snow storm. Ah, I must correct that. In the early weeks of the lockdown, the skies in Dallas were dark and grey. This went on for weeks. It felt like purgatory, or at least, limbo. A dark heaviness; the weather expressing its opinion on the state of world health.
Where I live now, in Texas, there is the season of summer, and when it is supposed to be spring or fall or winter, mostly, it’s not summer. Not ever really spring or fall or winter. Kind of a meh. I know, a silly complaint.
Fortunately I have the luxury of an air-conditioned home. I don’t think we would have lasted our first summer without it. I don’t like being hot. I spend a lot of time indoors.
When I say I have felt like a visitor these years, that’s not entirely true. I have made wonderful friends here and had adventures I would not have had if we had stayed put on Long Island. I doubt we would have gone to Colorado for vacations. Certainly we would not have gone to San Antonia the first Sumer we were here. Our youngest son took his first steps in an Embassy Suites near the Alamo. No, our world certainly opened up by moving across the country.
One thing you learn very quickly being a transplanted New Yorker: the rest of the world does not think New York is the center of the world. That was quite a lesson we didn’t know we needed. Wow, this country is big, really big, and full of wide open spaces and not every one cares about subway strikes and fast talking Yankees with our funny accents.
That was another thing to learn: accents. We moved here in 1991. The first World Trade Center bombing was in 1993. Of course, on the street reporters interviewed people coming out of TWTC, shaken from the explosion. The accents!!! Oh my!! It seemed like we were watching a movie and actors were hamming it up for the cameras. Did we all sound like that? No, but I realized what we must have sounded like to our new neighbors.
So, time will tell if I come back here regularly. Today I say I will. Hopefully, just for my own sake and discipline, I hope I do tomorrow.
Au revoir. A demain.