So, How's Retirement?

I got up a little before six this morning, and finished a project for a talk I'm giving in two weeks in Kansas City.  Then I spent the next four hours moving stuff around in the garage.  It feels good to have another box emptied and cut down; and then another; and then another.  It'll be a long time before everything is where we want it, but some progress is better than none.

Lots of folks here know that I've left the college and moved full time to Middletown Springs.  And they're uniformly happy about that.  But because of the particular history of the area, there's a specific way of understanding what it means to leave a professional position and move here.  It's called retirement.

About ten years ago, I was going through the Kroger checkstand, and the young woman at the register said, "Do you get the discount?"  I said, "What discount is that?"  And she said, "The over... oh, sorry."

About three years ago, I was getting a new cell phone, and explained to the young man at Verizon that I just wanted to use it as a telephone, nothing else.  He understood immediately, and recommended a Samsung for the quality of their electronics, and recommended a flip phone because it puts greater distance between earpiece and mouthpiece for less feedback.  He COULD have stopped there, but he had to continue... "And it has the extra-large keys, and the one-button 911 and one-button emergency contacts..."  Yeah, thanks, Sonny, I get the picture.

So now I've moved to Middletown Springs, and in the past three days, five separate people have asked me (in exactly these words), "So, how's retirement?"  I had a hard time with that on Friday night, as Nora will attest.  "I'm NOT retired!  I'm a consultant..." I whined.  I'm not even 55 yet (two more weeks), although I've been getting my AARP invitations for years.

But by Saturday morning, I was (temporarily) over it.  So when we went to the Post Office on Saturday morning and Bobby asked "So, how's retirement?", I just smiled and said it was good.  And ten minutes later, when we were at the dump and Dave asked, "So, how's retirement?", I just smiled and said it was good.

We define ourselves by our work, which leads to some mental trauma when the work is gone.  The fact is that I move boxes around in the garage, and I do a little work for our clients, and I play pool, and I write, and I cook dinner, and I'm always feeling a little anxiety no matter which one of those I'm doing because I'm not doing one of the other ones.  But all of those little anxieties are better than allowing myself to be defined by my employer, allowing someone else to decide what I should do and what I'm worth.

The present moment is the substance with which the future is made. Therefore, the best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. What else can you do? Take my hand. We will walk. We will only walk. We will enjoy our walk without thinking of arriving anywhere. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Marriage measurements

Well, the shoe has finally dropped. H is here full time. He has spent much of the day traveling between the garage and the sheds with wheelbarrow loads of cardboard and boxes of audio and video tapes that we haven't watched in more than 5 years and probably won't ever again. But I am loathe to give them up. Yet. My default answer to his question about hitting the delete key on my "stuff" is: "not yet." I am feeling a kid with the terrible twos. I suppose we will get through it intact, but we are beginning to establish something of a pattern, and in this case, it is "my bad." He has given away the couch and the microwave and the toaster. He left pots and pans and dishes and cutlery behind. He has a box of clothes for the Goodwill. And I have been holding onto what remains in the garage after truck loads of stuff got dumped or auctioned off. Now, I am sort of like a stuck record (remember those?), and "no" is my stock answer.

In any case, it is a more fluid time than it seems on its face.

Both of us have suddenly committed to moving our bodies and are finding that we can still do it. There was no moment of discovery, no gestalt, that started me walking, other than a felicitous encounter with a pair of shoes that turned me from hobbling like an 85 year old, to someone who walked 4.5 miles today!!!! (Wait! Is that your applause I hear?)

We have both started eating better, and we are cooking at home rather than going out for beer and chips or Indian food or pizza. (Convenience foods are so.......convenient!)

We have been drafting documents for the new business though not at what I would call a lightning pace...but they are good I think, truly good.

And we are both having these odd little moments that underline the fact that two married people are living in the same place at the same time. And that is HUGE after years of commuter life.

There is a small dressing area / closet between our bathroom and the bedroom.  I have one side and his shirts are hanging in the other. (He is much neater about the way his clothes are arranged.)

His shoes are covered in grass from walking around outside after mowing. Normally, he would have cleaned them so that they would be grass free when he put them on before heading back to Boston for the week's work.

He did the wash. I did the drying. He picked blueberries for cobbler that we served to friends. I picked peas. Instead of heading upstairs to work (which he did later), he went outside with a friend to help load the Hava-hart trap onto his truck so that we could relocate its resident to a new home. (The groundhog turned out to be a very confused grey squirrel.) 

Instead of going to the "Heads Meeting" last Tuesday, we talked to the guys who were pumping our septic tank.

And the work is turning out to find its own level. We have set up two desks in the office upstairs, one for each of us. I still have my writing nook downstairs off the dining room where I work in silence, but eventually I will be doing email and bills up there, close to the filing cabinets. H got new converter plugs so that his laptop can work off the large monitor he has set up, and he does his writing to music.

These odd little moments feel more like a marriage than I would have expected. I paid the young man who did some weed whacking the other day by giving him a check; H came in from outside a few minutes later and said, "You could have given him cash from my wallet." It was stunning. (OK maybe not stunning, but a surprise.)

We haven't resolved all the problems of two people living together at our tender ages and with our not-so-tender histories, but there is something surprising and rather endearing about these moments. When a  young friend got married a few years ago, I organized a women's-wisdom-shower for her, in which some of the middle-aged and senior ladies she knew provided nourishment. Some of that had nothing to do with food.

One woman who has been married for decades said, "you can be right or you can be married." Another talked of her new bride concerns about her husband's size. Her friends, she said, didn't want to talk about it. We all worried about what she was about to reveal. "Finally, I figured it out," she said. "I bought king sized sheets for the bed, so neither of us would be cold!" 

I have held on to that women's wisdom for several years now, though H and I were barely a glimmer in the eye on that afternoon. I remember much of what was shared....but one thing no one told me then was that marriage could also be measured in the sharing of the wallet and the closet, and grass on the soles of the shoes.

Country Greetings

Years ago, when I was living in Milwaukee, there was an occasional column in the Milwaukee Sentinel from a retired reporter who'd moved over to Janesville and taken up the life of the gentleman farmer.  In his columns, he talked about the things he was learning in the country.  And foremost among them, he claimed, was learning how to lean.

Men in farm country, he claimed, have conversations while leaning.  They lean on a fencepost, they lean against the fender of their truck.  Leaning has a sort of rhetorical function—"Yes, I'm working hard, and I'll soon return to my hard work, but let me rest for a moment and exchange a few words with my neighbor."  You might lean there and talk for forty minutes, but the implication is always partial, provisional, ready to move along once the conversation grew strained or the flow of topics trickled down.

I've written about that with teenagers as well.  Standing up from a sitting conversation is a clear sign that you're done, which could be perceived as boredom or rejection. But when you're leaning, you're already standing, just with a little assist to help take a load off.

When you sit, you commit.  When you lean, you don't mean to convene.

There are other rhetorical moves in the country, all based on the fact that you're not an anonymous face.   It may be that I don't know you, it may be that I've met you once and don't remember your name, it may be that we've seen each other at the dump and the post office and Vicky's half a dozen times and never been introduced... but given that we're both inhabiting this small patch of ground, we need to acknowledge one another somehow.  Here are some of the acknowledgements that I've learned.

Waving.  Nora and I walk in the morning along a busy road.  Cars go by six or eight times an hour.  And the first rule of walking and driving is that you always wave.  When walking, if the car is coming from behind, you slow and turn to face the car, so that you're making eye contact with the driver.  The appropriate wave gesture is the simple lifting of the hand and forearm, kind of like you're taking the oath of office but without the rigidity.  (If you raise your hand and wave, it means you need help.)

The driver has a broader array of reciprocating options.  If the walker is a friend (meaning someone you'd willingly have lunch with), the driver mirrors the raised arm.  If the walker is someone whose name is known, the driver raises his or her hand off the wheel briefly.  And if the walker is barely or not at all familiar, there is the finger wave, in which the driver (holding the wheel at 10 and 2 o'clock, as they taught us in driver's training) raises the index and middle finger of the right hand while continuing to hold the wheel with the ring finger, pinky and heel of the hand.  It's a definite gesture, there's no mistaking it, but it's not an invitation to coffee or anything.

The Weather Sonnet.  When you run into someone at the dump or the post office with whom you have no ongoing conversational topics but still need to greet, you can employ the weather sonnet.  To wit:

• Can you believe this (heat/rain/snow/wind/etc.)?
• I know, it's amazing, innit?
• If this keeps up, my (garden/firewood/driveway) is never going to (recover/dry/be clear).
• That's the truth.  But, hey, at least it's better than all that (recently different weather) we had.
• No, that's true.  Count your blessings, right?
• You bet.  Have a good day, now.

Blameless Gossip.  Instead of being the overt source of interpersonal information, you act as the magnet.  So instead of saying "Have you heard about____________?" you ask, "What do you know about____________?"  You might get some information, but if not, you'll get "Why, what's up with____________?" and you're now in the position of fulfilling a request for information, which is a communal responsibility and puts you in the ethical clear.  And of course, good conversations always involve lateral thinking, so pretty soon, you're talking about someone's grandkids or the VTel guy or the fire company, and the social ties are re-cemented.

Slowing at the Driveway.  The road we live on is a little over three miles long and unpaved, and there are long stretches of that road along unbroken woods or fields that have no entries.  And most of the houses are considerably back from the road, so the driveways (or access roads) are considerable.  When I'm out doing yard work or walking, I've noticed that most drivers slow just a little bit when they see the mailbox or reflectors that signal a driveway.  You never know when someone might be backing down to the road, adjusting the trajectory of a trailer, or pulling out suddenly on the riding mower; you want to make sure they have some space.

There are city versions of the same things, too.  They all have to do with reading the full range of a place's communication, of being civilized and attentive to others.  I'm happy to start to know the ones that root us here.

Genetic Sequencing

Rain.  Rain last night, rain this morning, rain through the day.

I woke up at 6:15, went to the bathroom, came back to bed, and finally got up at 6:45 with writing in my head.  I wrote until about 9:30, when the septic guys came to dig up the tank cover (in the rain) and pump the system.  There's a job...

Writing is a job, too, but it's less well defined.  If you want to get paid for doing it, you have to put some kind of structure around it.  Writers subscribe to writers' magazines in order to have some sense of that structure—how to find an agent, how to set a schedule, how to write a sequel-friendly plot.  All pleasant fictions to cover the fact that no good early-career writer knows what she's doing.

One of the things I've never seen anybody write about in these structural how-to articles is how to know what kind of a beast your idea is.  It seems like there ought to be a taxonomy.  You may not be able to identify the specific spider who's taken up residence in your woodpile, but it's easy enough to recognize the difference between the spider and the chipmunk and the birch tree.  It's not so easy, when you're starting to work with an idea, to know whether it's a book or an essay or an academic paper or a talk.  A book is as different from an academic paper as the spider is from the chipmunk, but when you're down in the originating DNA of its ideas, you don't know what it ought to become.

Maybe it's a blog post.

This is where external structures come in so handily.  If you're a columnist for a daily newspaper, you have a 700-word frame.  The possibilities of book and PowerPoint show and PBS script are off the table, at least for the job ahead of you; you're writing 700 words or so of un-illustrated text, which will be next to the Macy's ad.  If you're a famous author, people give you frames.  Your agent and publisher want another book; the New York Review wants an essay on political upheaval in Syria; a college in Montana wants a 20 minute commencement address.  Those are all knowable; when Campus Compact asked me to do a 45-minute talk in May, I knew how to make one of those, and I knew what size idea fit that kind of a frame.

But I have four or five different projects going on right now that are self-generated rather than requested.  And I haven't the faintest idea yet what kind of creature each one will be.  I've been asked in vague terms to write a book on higher education (by clients who liked the 45-minute talk version).  But is it really a book?  Or is it a white paper?  Or is it another series of 45-minute talks?  "Book" has always been the Grail of the writer, the sign that one has made it.  But it's hardly the only effective format.  Just in the two-plus hours of writing this morning, I've thought it should be a book, or a series of animated YouTube videos, or a theatrical monologue, or a PBS miniseries.

And I have a second "book" on advice for first-generation students considering graduate school and faculty life.  And a third "book" having to do with the emotional and spiritual dimensions of pool.  And a fourth "book" on unexpected career choices.  And I know that Nora's working on a "book" or two herself, about which she will tell me nothing yet.  And all of those are underway, in the early stages of idea formation.  Language is being shaped, arcs and sequences developed.  But until we know whether we're writing spiders or chipmunks or birch trees, it's tenuous work.

Still, I'm grateful to not have to pump septic tanks in the rain.

T-shirt and shorts

It has been an interesting day today--in the way small things here are interesting to me--the discovery of a new color of lily (red) hiding behind the gooseneck loosestrife, or the Japanese beetles invading the shrub at the corner of the house. Herb has been decanting the boxes of stuff from the apartment in Medford. I took a long walk in the neighborhood.  I put another insecticide--well bacteria-cide on the garden and am feeling like a chemist rather than a gardener: Serenade and Seaside and Liquid Fence and Rotenone and Diatomaceous Earth. And finally the heat has broken so that I can do these things without being stung by deer flies. And I should be sitting working on the class I am teaching in 9 days or so. But I am a bit restless. Maybe it is because we have finally completed the last move after so many in the past year. The garage is as full of Herb's stuff from Medford, as the garage at the tiny house I rented was a year and change ago. Seems more like a hundred years. I feel oddly wiser now than when all that began back then--like the begat cycles of the Bible, or its plagues. 

In any case, I have been sitting at my desk, catching up on email, avoiding working on the class, and thinking about changes, the micro and the macro scale changes and the way we measure them, while Herb is on the lawn mower in between spells of rain and scorch. He is wearing a t-shirt. He never wears t-shirts. He was wearing shorts the last two days. He never wears shorts. They are odd markers of his comfort with being here. He always wore jeans or khakis and a button-down collared shirt before, or one of the pseudo-Hawaiian shirts that make me cringe. But he is entering the life of a Vermonter. Or at least so I think.

I find it oddly sexy.

Now imagine a movie screen dissolve and a change of scenes here...It's what The New Yorker's writers  do when they start to tell a story and then break to a flash back or some other character's narrative or a scene change, leaving you hanging on the suspense-filled story they had begun.

I was reading through the e-mailed solicitations for signatures and a few dollars that were arrayed single file on my computer screen--the "defenders of wildlife",  the independent media sources, the Obama-supporters, the representatives of regional and state government, the activist phone company and the organization originally founded to stop-the-endless-harangues-of-the-impeachment-forces-in-the wake-of-the-Lewinsky-scandal-and-now-a-petition-signing-pass-through-operation-for-left-wing-causes etc.--and I came to the following:  

"I love maps. Which is good, because running our Purple to Blue program involves poring over a lot of them. Right now I've got two of them hanging on my wall.  The first is a map of Virginia -- it's covered in Post-Its, marking target races, key districts, and campaign plans.

The other is our map of 2014 Target States. Soon, it will have lists of potential candidates and pickup opportunities. But for now, it's totally blank except for one critical, all-important goal: Win in Virginia.

Victory in Virginia gives us the momentum to win across the country in 2014 and beyond. We've got our candidates -- can you chip in $4 or more today to build our urgently needed grassroots campaign.  

It's hard to understate how pivotal this fall's elections are. A decisive win in Virginia lets us expand our target map, gives us a blueprint for future victories, and delivers a powerful blow to far-right donors and special interests. But if we come up short this fall, we'll find ourselves playing defense against a re-energized conservative movement -- one that's causing plenty of damage already.

Want to restore women's rights in Texas? Protect working families in Wisconsin? Repeal "Stand Your Ground" laws in Florida? The path to victory lies in winning back key state houses and districts -- and that road starts by winning in Virginia, Nora.

To get there, we're building a unified grassroots campaign from the ground up, and we don't have a moment to lose."

So I wonder how we decide what battles aren't worth winning, and how we decide where our energy must be put to the task of making change. That's not a fashionable sentiment, but it isn't entirely new. Remember during the first Obama campaign when there was that email about letting the red states secede and take all the poverty and teen pregnancy and education failures with them, while the blue states kept the vineyards and the water and the cities with good restaurants and the film industry and the R1 educational institutions? Well I am back there today. I don't think that my $4 is going to do anything to change the South. I don't think that if we are able to mount serious dollars against the Koch brothers' assault on human decency, we will change the pattern of life for those who live in the South or that Bobby Jindall and Rick Perry and Santorum et al are going to go away. Or that Grover Norquist will find truth and honesty beside Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter in a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon at the San Francisco celebration of the defeat of DOMA. Abortion clinics won't suddenly be allowed to operate without phalanxes of people displaying posters of aborted fetuses. The men who want to ensure that they can buy their grills from WalMart while they know that it is destroying Main Street culture and JOBS (remember those?), won't suddenly decide that it makes more sense to shop somewhere that pays its employees a livable wage.

(A small parenthetical note here: According to that bastion of liberal thinking, The New York Times:

"According to the American Federation of Teachers, the state with the highest average pay for teachers in 2003-04 was Connecticut, at $56,516; the lowest was South Dakota, at $33,236.
Or look at it this way: Pick a corporate chieftain — say, Jeffrey R. Immelt of General Electric. He earns $15.4 million a year. Every single day — including Thanksgiving and Christmas — he makes almost what the average teacher does for a year of taming wild children, staying up nights planning lessons, and, really, helping to shape a generation.")

And though I am not the first one to compare all this to the fundamentalists in the Middle East who deny a woman a place in public society, the parallels are stark. I am also probably not the first one to say that as we probably can't change every culture to democratic process by will or war, we also probably can't change our own country's fundamentalists by will or building wealth to counter wealth. OK, so it is probably worth sending money to support the independent media, and I have my mother's words ringing in my ears about writing editorials to the press to tell them when I agree and when I don't, but for the most part,  I think we make change at home. I think that Texas women need to vote their representatives out of office. I think that the pro-choice forces need to provide protection for women who need access to Planned Parenthood in North Dakota and Wyoming. But there will always be fundamentalists with more time on their hands to shout and make protest signs and stand in the hot sun, trying to impose their decisions on others.  The American Taliban. Somebody wrote that book didn't they? Amazon says it was the brilliant founder of The Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas.  He used data to predict the 2012 election while the right wing was dissolving in its own flop sweat.

Here comes that dissolve again...

So here we are in a state where people work multiple jobs to be able to live here. The bartender at the place we go on the weekends, looks like she is 20 something but has three kids and one is ten years old. She can't be 20. Her partner behind the bar doesn't look much older, but has two kids. I asked if they see each other after work or whether they never want to see anybody related to work once they get home from an 8 to 9 mile run around the bar area each night. "No!" Miranda said. "We have 5 kids between us, and she does my nails. And when I work at the Snack Bar three nights a week..." So she's pouring wine and scooping ice cream; her friend may be working in a salon or at the local school as a substitute teacher and their husbands or boyfriends are probably working construction and coaching Little League or soccer. And that's what their kids are seeing. Mom and Dad making a living at multiple jobs. Or Mom if the marriages don't survive. And of our friends? Most of them are working more than one job and volunteering to keep the town's institutions afloat.  And that doesn't include time in the gardens and keeping the lawn mowed....

Oh yeah...the lawn mower....So what's the connection? Remember that solicitation about funding the grassroots movements?  (Hah!)

Herb said last night that he is starting to feel that this is home in a way he hasn't had a home in many years. He has the t-shirt and shorts to prove it. We picked blueberries in the backyard this morning, and he dumped a few Japanese beetles in a jar of soapy water.  And he watered the new trees. And we went to the dump and the local post office to pick up our mail. And when he finishes with the lawn and I finish with this post, we will pick up the work on building our business again. And I will work on the class. And he will write. And Derrick may stop by to check on our early-blighted tomatoes. Or on the garage full of boxes and chairs. Or on us.

And restoring women's rights in Texas, and having the right to work for a livable wage, or to walk the street without being profiled?  These are huge issues and I want to believe that I can make change, but as I get older, I believe that generating money in Vermont to influence a "grassroots campaign" in Texas or Virginia or Florida changes only what you know when you read the paper or watch TV. And while that matters when one side controls all the media outlets, change has to come from within. 

We have a friend who isn't convinced about global warming. We are working on that with him. Over coffee. And we have another friend who sees himself as a Republican, and a believer. He talked with us the other day about people who are unemployed and can't find work despite their efforts to do so. It isn't their fault, he said. And I suspect that he saw some of that close to home as his two sons have struggled to find work to keep themselves afloat. It isn't the way it once was. And we are all struggling to find the path, to stay afloat. Well, except for the Koch brothers and Ann Coulter and her friends.

Grassroots indeed. The lawnmower engine is off. Time to get to work.

Last

As many of you know, and as Nora will be all too happy to remind you, I am a person of rituals.  I am comforted by habit, by repetition.  A habit is the paved road through the wilderness of life.

But a love of ritual makes the end of rituals all the more poignant.

At 6:15 this morning, I made my last stop at the Newbury Street Dunkin' Donuts, for my iced tea and donut.  Then I walked out and gave the homeless man with the burn-melted hands the last dollar we would share.

I finished my last statistical compendium for the college.  I uploaded my last file from my computer onto the server.

I shared my last hallway conversations with a couple of dozen colleagues.

I went to yet another departure drink after work.  So many times we've crowded around a table at one of the Back Bay's taverns on a Friday evening, to say farewell to Jennifer and Richard and Tiffany and Andrew and Justin and Emily and Cat and Caitlyn... and now to me.

I went back to work after drinks, to finish sending files to those who would find them most useful.  To write inscriptions in my books to two friends who have touched me most deeply, and leave those books on appropriate office chairs.

I turned off both monitors, the speakers, and the computer.  The whole second floor — likely the entire building — was empty at 10 PM.

I put the last personal items into my wheeled bag.  I took a last look to make sure I was leaving nothing behind.  I took my office key off my keyring, and took my electronic pass card out of its wallet sleeve.  I found an envelope, put the key and card inside, marked it and put it onto the monitor stand.

I closed my office door, then the floor's door, then the building's door, knowing each time that I had surrendered my ability to reverse those decisions.  Once closed and outside, I had no access.  I heard that door rattle, and then the electronic lock click, for the last time.  I took my last walk from work to the parking garage, saw my last crowds of beautiful young people immersed in Back Bay socio-sexual pursuit.  I paid my last parking fee, watched the gate arm swing upward for the last time.  Drove eastbound on Storrow, took Exit 29 from I-93.  Never again.  At least not this way, not in this context.  Not as this person.

Tomorrow is a day to consider nexts.  Packing, phoning, planning — the future calls with boundless opportunities and delights.  But tonight, I think of lasts, of rituals that can no longer be reclaimed.

One year

The cliches remark on how much can happen in an eye-blink of time.  They caution us to appreciate the moment, because we don't know what is to come. And we nod and go on about our business. But this has been one of those years. And it follows on one of those years.  Those of you who know us, know the drill, but for convenience sake (and for those from Latvia and Moldova who have happened by), let me repeat it...

2012:

• June 25: Our first anniversary - an impossible feat after years of acquaintance-ship, years of friendship, and then years of living separately and seeing each other when it was possible, and then a wedding...and what a wedding it was! And then a year of traveling between three states, watching mom fail, and trying to hold together what we had promised each other
• June 26: The closing: Our dream of having a house of our own becomes real (amid a mix-up of which branch of the bank to go to and arriving late)  - and it is THE house that we imagined and never thought possible
• June 27: the packing continues
• June 28 and 29: the marshaling of legions of friends from our town, the movers from hell, and a move that left us panting
• June 29: more moving - all the things that had not yet been packed (bless our friends who managed it all),  the Rubbermaid containers and boxes in the garage, the full size loom, the garden debris,  removing the accumulated detritus, cleaning the house we were leaving, and with our phone service restored in the evening it becomes clear that I need to head to New York to await mom's passing.
• June 30: midnight in New York
• July 1: Estelle Ellis Rubinstein passed away as the obits say, "peacefully, surrounded by family and friends."  Perhaps not surprisingly, her heart continued to beat strong after her breathing had stopped.

And now we have celebrated another year's passage.

2013:

• another year of marriage
• a year of deciding where we belong -- to a career path or a life, to what we have been trained to do or to what we believe in
• a year in our beloved home (how odd that word still seems!)
• a year of unpacking boxes: ours and hers, from New York and Fire Island, and now one more move as Herb closes down his place in Massachusetts - the fifth in one year
• a year without a life force that moved mountains, and when she no longer had the strength, the mountains came to her.

It is common for people to talk about a missing parent or spouse in certain ways.

• I almost lifted the phone to call...
• I felt her presence when I was struggling...

 A friend once said that her finger nails changed and became more ridged, like her mother's, after her mother died.

These have not happened.

But I have thought often about how much pleasure she would have taken in spending time in this house, and in watching her daughter's marriage grow.  I don't know whether she would have preferred the porch rockers that came from her house in Fire Island, or the patio table that she bought for me when I was still living in the little yellow cape. She bid that tiny house good-bye each time she left. Thanked it for what it gave. What would she have made of this place?

I know she would have fallen asleep in the leather chair by the pellet stove, newspapers arrayed at her feet.  I know she would have been making phone calls to friends in New York and California, planning theater dates, dinners at her favorite restaurant Blue Hill, where they saved a table for her when David Rockefeller wasn't there.

I know she would have relished the weather that is so present and the garden.

I know that she would have called a number of people in this tiny town, who had become her friends as well as mine. One told me how she had danced with him at our wedding. Others have told me how much they admired her ability to speak and be gracious to strangers. An old Vermont friend never fails to say how much it means that my mother called her "friend."

My memories are not so gilded. We would have argued; we often did.

But one year after we sat beside her, watching her heart beat on, I think of her strength rather than the struggles. 

• I think of how she would have felt about H's resignation and about his many speaking commitments. A family member once said when my brother couldn't get a word in edgewise: "she was used to talking to large audiences." She would have understood his challenges and his successes.
• I think of how she would have been insistent on helping to shape the logo, the website, the name of our new business.  It was, after all, what she knew in the deepest marrow of her bones. 
• I think of what she would have advised when H and I have reached impasses on issues we feel strongly about. She would have had answers though I have none.  She was sure of herself in ways I have not learned. 

But one year after she died, and one year after this house became completely and fully our house, and one year of stashing her clothes and her books in corners, and cleaning up the Hurricane Sandy debris in Fire Island, and two years after our wedding at which she danced with a man as tall as my father, I think she would have been at peace.

 עליה השלום.