Surroundings Are So Important

We came down to Sarasota in 2008 after the economic collapse when expansion of the campus of the senior retirement home outside New York City into which we had planned to spend our remaining years fell through. In a fit of exasperation I took, as they say, a chunk of money out of the bank determined to get something in this warm climate, to assuage the disappointment of losing out on the proximity to my notion of the Center of the World.  We went with a real estate agent recommended by friends and she showed us three or four items in our modest price range.  We rejected stand alone smallish houses, one, because it made me think of raising four children, neighbors with children and dogs, the paraphernalia of another life, two, because my husband was done with doing home repair.  We looked at a condo building sandwiched between a parking lot for a mall and the faculty parking lot of a middle school, an unpromising location that was immediately attractive to us, and a mystery to everyone we know who visit us here.  Well, we liked being isolated away from anything else, floating on a sea of macadam and surrounded more immediately by trees, we liked being on the top floor and looking off over rooftops, we liked the nearby bus system and the noise of a city, both of us remembering times in our lives when we were lost in the immense silence of suburbia.  We liked being able to walk thither and yon to destinations like stores rather than staring at yet another clump of bushes.  Most of all I have grown to love the aesthetics that this location provides me.  I am a great fan of easel painting, in fact, our walls here are covered with paintings, and watercolors, and photographs, all in their rectangular frames.  Reality cut out and boundaries established, that gives me an enormous thrill.  I love Mondrian in another way or the early Kandinksy's oh, all sorts of things with thrilling interventions of line, edging, and shaping.  Here on our third floor I look in the morning from the balcony and there is the line of the roof of the middle school, impeccable in its neatness and precision, a dark shadow below and the sky every minute turning another shade of pink above, and the variant of the small clouds adding punctuation of softness into the hard edge aesthetic otherwise created.  In the evening I sit on my little balcony gazing off to the west and first I encounter the long horizontal of a roof top, above it another pink sky shading from faint to bold, more clouds, sometimes functioning as markers, and then there is here and there and one place or another a large palm tree whose fronds punctuate the whole in an entirely different way.  Closer to hand if I sit in another spot I can gaze into this through the medium of half opened blinds, and another criss-cross of definition is added to my visual pleasure.  But what about the beach and the open sea, friends gently ask, and I say skin cancer and the boredom of too much undefined open space.