Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Snow Birds Going Home

I guess I should be pleased that I am able to control so many details of my daily life as I make the plans involved in moving myself along with our household from Florida to Massachusetts.  Packing items into my briefcase is the test: will I remember the electronic chargers, the Kindle, my numerous medications and vitamins, my passport, the keys for the apartment in New York, "the New York wallet" with all the museum passes, the subway card, and so on and so forth?  Our condo apartment has been readied for our departure, cleaned up, swept out; I actually feel tranquil and what is more not the least apprehensive for having that feeling.  Is it at last a mastery of my situation or a demented old person's ignorance of all the issues that are involved in this south to north move?  It will be the last time.  We have decided to sell our house up north and move back down here permanently, a decision that fills me with waves of uncertainty.  Florida is not our kind of place, despite the superb temperatures in the winter months: it is a little hard to take the obvious disapproval for same sex marriage one sometimes encounters; I will not go into guns and religion.  And the summers are so hot and humid.  Still we are doing it, moving down here.  Unlike every other move in my life, and there have been many, this one does not generate the enthusiasm of expectation.  I don't know how to describe it.  If I say "it doesn't really matter," I can hear the voice of a friend of mine complaining that her aunt, very much my age, confessed recently--complacently not depressed-- that "nothing really matters anymore."   My friend says that's depression or the onset of dementia.  I don't know.  It seems to me that the goal is to be in a place where you can walk around easily because there is no ice nor snow.  Maybe I'm crazy, but mobility is all.  I can even drive a car down here easily because there are very good side streets for my kind of driving alongside the Los Angeles inspired four to six lane roadways that they call "roads" or "boulevards."  I wonder what it would be like if I lived alongside some one of my children and grandchildren, as though we were in Greece or Italy, old nonno there by the fire or out under the arbor.

No comments:

Post a Comment