Here is a short list of things I have learned:

First decade, birth through 9 – Bodily Functions
I learned to walk and move my body without smashing into things, to ride a bike without holding on, to sit in balance atop a horse, to swim in the salty waters surrounding City Island, to write, and to read about Lassie, the Black Stallion, and the holy martyrs who willingly allowed others to violate their bodies.

Second decade, 10 through 19 – Independence
I learned to change a diaper, look after my little brothers, hitchhike, clean up my room and paint the walls, run away from home and return with my tail between my legs, make pancakes, body surf, pass a blastocyst, go to the hospital, leave home, drink a pint of scotch in one sitting, get a job and then another and another, and rent an apartment.

Third Decade, 20 through 29 – Healing
I learned what it feels like to get your head shrunk, to dry out, wait tables, drive a car across country and back, and start thinking of others. I began amassing a tool kit of coping strategies for living without fear, pain, or avoidance. I learned to laugh and help others see the funny.

Fourth Decade, 30 through 39 – Consequences
I learned about marriage and how one shouldn’t take it lightly and marry the wrong person but most of us do anyhow and have to get divorced. I learned to pay attention to my body and feed it with exercise. I started jogging, then learned to stretch first after getting plantar fasciitis. I learned how to start a business and later, why owning a business is not for me.

Fifth Decade, 40 through 49 – Enlightenment
I learned about life after divorce, how to recognize my soul mate, about true love, second chances, following my heart, sharing a life, shaping a life, and how it feels to live off the grid in a developing country.

Sixth Decade, 50 through 59 – Maturity
I learned about forgiveness, how to connect with my parents, nurture a marriage, feed family connections, move and settle down, move and settle down, give everything my all, stay committed, and be kind.

Seventh Decade, 60 through 69 – Self Care
I learned to say no, slow down, ask for help, take it easy, make French Onion Soup, self-publish, learn from others, take nothing for granted, and focus on the people who bring me joy.

Many of you have learned these lessons and more. Perhaps you know how to make a Souffle, or knit a sweater, or not use swear words in front of decent folk. Like you, I am still learning and like you, I did not learn these things without help.

My father nurtured my intellectual curiosity, my mother took me into the water, held my hands, and told me to kick, my grandmothers gave me unconditional love and cookies, my brothers taught me to be gentle, my friends helped me listen and learn, and my husband, Bob, proved to me the power of hope over experience.

Bob started tiny Columbine seedlings under lights more than a year ago and when they were strong enough, I planted them in an amended garden along our east-facing fence. They seemed to like that spot over the winter, blessed with the morning sun, and now they delight us with their showy blooms.

Spring Song may well have hung in my Nana’s home. At some point I stumbled on a print and brought it home. Rumor has it that the little girl is Glücklich’s blind daughter and that the the child has her eyes closed in the original painting.

A robin sings from a bare birch branch cast in muted light with only a muddy hint of spring. The girl is wearing a brocade jumper laced in green, sitting on a bench, her face turned towards the bird.

In Spring Song, I see the spirit of my Nana and am filled with gratitude for her and for my happy childhood days at her house. As I drift off to sleep at night, I look at the little girl and see myself as the pampered little girl. I feel the spirit of my childhood as it connects with Nana’s childhood, she as much the little girl as I am and the two of us connected in a sense, to all the little girls of the world.

Bob took a photo of a Blue Heron as we were canoeing down the Myakka river in the early ’90s, and later painted it in watercolor. It is one of his best early works, definitive proof that he does have artistic talent despite what he heard as a child from the adults in his life.

There are several ghosts in this one. There’s the spirit of my mother’s intrepid cousin Beverly, and of Bob and I at that heady moment, pivoting to leave Colorado, madly in love and ready to eat the world. And there’s the tug south, that yearning for the tropics, a spirit which will never die.

How cold it was in Colorado the day we left for Sarasota—15°F below—and the car wouldn’t start so we called a tow truck or a cab. How fresh the thick Florida air from Beverly’s screened porch, teeming with spring, no ice or snow in sight, only alligators slipping from the shallow beaches where they’d been soaking in the sun.

Beach Birthday, by Bob January, 2022 depicts the Topsail beach Bob chose for celebrating his birthday. It highlights a moment in which Bob is sitting on the veranda gazing out at the waves and at his wife lying in the sun after a swim.

The spirit of this picture is my love, Bob, the barefoot boy who speaks Twi and identifies with the fish. The man who transported me to four different tropical islands to live in heated splendor. This is us at our best, relaxed, with salt water licking at our ankles.

Tall Boy’s portrait of Little Corn Island’s cliffs has of course, captured his spirit, his quiet presence, towering and just. And by extension, his wife Maribel and our months there in Nicuargua, our Thursday snorkels, the ruined coke boat, the beans and rice, the pistols, the coconut palms, and the dogs.

The etching of Seabiscuit holds the spirit of my cousins Frank and Mark, and our childhood together in the neighborhood they shared with our Nana. It invokes memories of summers on the lawn, of playing pick-up-sticks on the dining room table after Sunday dinner, and of the Stone Church Fair where my little cousins bought this print with me in mind because they knew how much I loved horses.

Seabiscuit summons those sublime and safe years, all the magnificent food, the strawberries and cream beneath the shade of the big oak, the chocolate chip cookies, tetrazzini, poppy seed bread, potato leek soup, and English muffins drowning in butter. Here are the night crickets, our skinny beds beneath the looming screens, the dogs chasing through the leaves to the top of the hill, and the drone of a lone motorcycle near midnight.

Here are the roses and the tomatoes, the chives, the living room dancing with light from the prisms, the jade plant on its own table, the porcelain swan, wings arched over a keepsake bowl on the cutout shelves between Nana’s green chair with its matching dial phone and the dining room table where stories were told and olives placed on fingers.

This photograph of Jesse in his green halter—the halter Julie brought me the day I brought him home as a two-year-old—tied with the end of a lead rope for riding, conjures Jesse’s spirit. He is turning to look back, ears focused on something about to happen, coat shining with summer, his eye as deep as a well. Here I see the spirit of Bob and I galloping across the fields, eyes stinging from the wind, in a gait so smooth we could have passed a glass of wine between us. I see pride, solace, joy, and freedom.

We called him the wonder horse, the best there ever was, and god bless Julie for giving him the greatest gift, a fine home after we decided to leave the country for Belize. Julie welcomed him, pampered him, and gave him a beautiful, long life. Jesse was my first horse—a childhood dream realized in my thirties. I trained him myself and he was the envy of my friends. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for me. If I told him to step off a bridge, he might have done it. And he saved my life at least once.

Homo Sapiens built enormous homes and blew up mountains for minerals to heat them with. They covered their food in plastic, and the plastic ended up in landfills, waterways, and inside animals. The well-to-do relied on the disadvantaged to trim their toenails and cook their food. The planet was heating up, the ice caps were melting, and hundreds of thousands of animals were sailing over the extinction cliff with humans close behind them.

Yes, humans were a runaway train of obscene wastefulness in the pre-Covid days and it took a pandemic to wake them up. But that was eons ago.

After the virus killed millions and dismantled the global economy, people sobered up and let go of non-essential nonsense. They learned to garden, cook, and cut their nails, they began harnessing solar and wind for energy, built smaller homes, and stopped smothering everything in single-use plastic packaging. Meanwhile, the trees grew, unhindered, and, over time they turned the air breathable again.

The best part of this story? Covid-19 was a virus that attacked human lungs.

Although the sky is white, the lawn, the crepe myrtles, and the roses are tinged yellow. I don’t know where Dorian is on the map this morning because I have not yet turned on my laptop. My browser can wait until I’ve had my fill of cocoa. I absorb the morning, with my journal, my reading glasses, and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac beside me.

~*~

We lost our wifi for a few days at the end of July. I had been working at the kitchen sink with half an eye on the rain sheeting off the roof when lightning struck outside the window. I jumped back at the same moment a loud pop on the other side of the room propelled Bob from his desk. He’d seen smoke above our Wi-Fi hookup, and our internet was out. I watched him loosen the backplate on our dead modem. Tiny bits of porcelain fell out, and there was a charred scar beside a shattered capacitor.

Bob ordered a replacement modem and rigged up a hot spot from his phone so that I could get online. He’d be flying to Houston in the morning, and I’d be disconnected until UPS delivered the new modem, stuck alone in the house with my flip phone and magazines. I assured him I’d be fine. I don’t need my browser, I told him with a cocky smirk. I have a rich and satisfying life outside The New York Times, The Atlantic, Gmail, Google, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

I used the hot spot to look at my calendar, and the weather, and sent emails saying I could only be reached by phone for the next three days. I was tempted to say that I’d be technologically marooned because our modem got hit by lightning, that Bob was going away for nine days with his smartphone, that the new modem wouldn’t reach our front porch until Friday, and that there was a chance I won’t be savvy enough to hook it up without Bob’s big brain to guide me. I was tempted to type all of this and more, as if they were my last words. To type while the typing was good, before my screen faded to black.

The next morning, I watched Bob drive off the in the dark and went back inside the house. I connected to the Mobile Web on my phone and found that I could access a handful of CNN headlines but nothing more. I tried to write but was distracted by the day yawning ahead. Finally, I grabbed my wallet and the mail and got into the car, switching on NPR before backing out of the garage. In town, I sat in front of the post office listening to the 6:00 news. I drove to the grocery store and sat in their lot, listening to more stories.

Back home, I worked in the yard like I do most days. I tidied the house and worked in the kitchen, pining for my podcasts, wishing I had a radio. I read The Sun magazine and Aldo’s essays and made phone calls. “You don’t have a radio?” said one friend after another. By the second day, I didn’t miss my browser. I spent more time on the phone and reading. Bob and I talked a lot, probably more than we do when he’s home, both distracted by our screens.

~*~

It was a proud moment for me when I succeeded in hooking up the new modem. I clicked on the Google Chrome icon, my excitement mounting along with something else. I stared at my inbox, at close to a hundred new emails, and took a moment before diving into the deep waters of undigested newsletters, notifications, and personal correspondence.

Thirty minutes later, I had opened tabs for news stories I wanted to pursue and social media I needed to check before responding to friends. Now I was clicking through Facebook notifications, determined to reach ground zero, the flood of emails barely addressed. My chest tightened, and I recognized the feeling. It was fear, plain and simple. The fear that I would never reach the surface, never get a handle on things; that I wasn’t up to the task, that I was going to be left behind, and ultimately, find out that I didn’t belong and was condemned to a solitary, disconnected life. Primal fear began in my stomach and worked its way up through my chest until I was choking on it. I was drowning; sipping off a fire hose. I closed my laptop and went outside.

The next day, I bought a used clock radio for $2.00.

~*~

Just writing about my offline/online experience this morning, sitting on the back porch, waiting for the rain, has made my chest tighten again. I’m retired, I tell myself; any pressure to keep up is pressure of my own making. None of this is real: the notifications, the op-eds, the trending videos, and the “like” hearts. What’s real is the soul-baring dispatches from friends, which in the absence of email could be answered on paper or with a call.

It hasn’t started raining yet, but the traffic has risen from a dribble to a steady flow. I’m about to start a load of laundry, reheat some leftovers, and type this essay. I remind myself that when I open Chrome, I only need answers to three questions and that, if I wanted to, I could listen for those answers on the radio:

• Is what’s-his-name still in the White House?
• Are we still at war?
• When will the rain begin?

It’s nice to have Lucy’s company, but it comes with a price. She is not shy about telling me all about her last 24-hours in a language I cannot understand. The chickens also have a lot to say. But I welcome the sound of other animals. Much of what I do is done alone these days. I am the invisible hand that shapes the world around me, and that is as it should be. No one needs to see me struggling to free a limb saw from a branch that has bitten back and clamped on. I don’t want anyone watching me shove the vacuum cleaner against the nap of our bedroom carpet. And writer’s block, like constipation, is best suffered in private.

At the end of the day, after a shower and a change of clothes, I walk around the yard with Bob admiring the mulch around our fruit trees and our pristine gardens. After I’ve coughed up some words and rearranged them into a second draft, I punt them over to Bob for editing. He doesn’t have to see the first draft. That’s for no one but me to see. I present a finished meal every evening, plate ready—potato peels and nicked fingers omitted. I’ve heard it said that no one wants to hear about the labor; they just want to see the baby.

And yet, I opened an Instagram account not so long ago and began to crow about my accomplishments in their unvarnished state. I got into the Instagram game right about the time it began trending away from glitzy, staged photo art. I figured out how to put my laptop in smartphone mode and posted bowls of harvested peppers, laundry piles, seed orders, and Bob and I smiling in front our new Chevy Volt before driving it home from the dealer. Maybe I’m not so into private life as I pretend to be.

Like Lucy, I also mark my territory. In Africa, I impaled a muddy baby doll head on a spike atop our razor-wired gate. Bob was horrified, but I thought it was funny. Twenty years ago, before Facebook, before Instagram, he created a platform for our online presence, a site we named Troutsfarm after the little horse farm we sold in 1997. We used our farm’s logo, a hand-drawn yin yang blend of horse and trout, to brand our website.

Last week Bob dressed up our new car by adding a front plate with the Troutsfarm logo. And yesterday he drilled a hole in the belly of a plastic dinosaur—Toy Story’s Rex—and stuck it atop one of the metal pipes that define our property line. Whether it’s an Instagram post, a personal website, a vanity plate, or Dino-Boy on a survey pin, we all need to make our mark upon the world.

January has been a real test. I’m settling into a new job and I won’t lie—the learning curve momentarily took my moxie away. A new operating system, new software, a new type of business, and a tiny keyboard had me wondering if there was something wrong with my brain. But I rallied and have recovered my stride.

So far there is no drama associated with my new gig and I aim to keep it that way. When I mentioned this at the Country Farm and Home counter the other day, paying for bird seed and wheat straw, a customer behind me snickered. I turned and we both laughed. “As if!” she said. “Yeah, right?!” I blurted, enjoying the moment, and then in my signature off-the-cuff way I said, “Drama happens everywhere if you stick around long enough. It builds up like plaque!”

It occurs to me I’m not even sure what the word drama means so I start asking around. One bright young woman defines it as “Things that make you suck in your breath real quick.” The dictionary defines drama as: Any situation or series of events having vivid, emotional, conflicting, or striking interest or results.” Armed with two workable, albeit broad interpretations, I got to work categorizing situations that fit the mold.

First off, there is my own personal drama. Although this type of drama might seem unavoidable, I actually do have control over how much drama I solicit and how heartily I react. One woman told me she was much more into drama when she was younger and I realized this was also true for me. We have both learned to keep ourselves out of trouble and to temper our responses to the unavoidable.

I’m no longer a catastrophizer, my own word that means someone who takes a little bit of drama and cooks it up into something big. My mother used to call this “Making mountains out of molehills.”

Next, there’s the type of drama we experience vicariously. You can’t build intimate friendships without sharing a little of your own inner workings but it’s essential to know how much to share, and when to turn it off—how to toe the line between venting and obsessing.

Our outer circle of friends is where I need to watch my step. Here I’m learning to strike a balance between interest and involvement. Sometimes it’s alright to dismiss a situation with, “Well, it’s their life, their marriage, their children…” and other times I have to reach out and weigh in. Especially when I can see that whatever just happened is horribly unjust or unfair. Either way, it’s a good idea not to do too much thinking about what’s going on in the lives of people I don’t know terribly well.

And then there is the drama of unmet actors on the world stage. For me, this is the safest kind of drama, a cathartic exercise that helps me calibrate my moral compass. This kind of drama is the story of how human minds work. News stories evoke responses like, Don’t that beat all?” and “How does something like this happen?” Voyeuristic drama feeds the creative juices my writing head requires without risking contamination.

A few days after my Country Farm and Home encounter, I marched into Chatham Marketplace for Brussels sprouts and was stopped short by a bank of yawning shelves. Craig, busy as ever, twinkle in his eye, quipped over his shoulder, “Drama!” Hmm, I thought, I guess non-human breakdowns can be classified as drama, too.

Like salt, drama spices up my life. And like salt, a pinch brings out the flavor, while too much renders food inedible. Unlike salt, I don’t have to add drama to my life. Drama happens when things break down, when I receive a letter from a friend, when the car leaves me stranded, when politics goes my way, when the heat pump fails, or when deer eat our broccoli. Drama is joy and loss, birth and death—unavoidable, and essential to a full and interesting life.

Stuff happens all the time to rock our little worlds. All the planning in the world won’t prevent software changes from messing up my mojo, or grocery stores from running out of Brussels sprouts. Be cautious about adding outside drama. One day you may be blindsided by an indigestible tsunami of grief: a loved one snatched by death, a cancer diagnosis, a slip and a fall. Err on the side of boring. Savor those stretches of bland. Add a pinch of drama when necessary. Season to taste.

My first thought was about Bob and how we are both old hippies who share the same cultural background and values. In the early stages of my relationship with Bob my mother gave me this advice: “The most important thing is that you share the same values.” My enduring friendships are also based on common values. My friend Pam and I call each other two peas in a pod, Haruka and I both believe in supporting our husbands with clean laundry and cooked meals, and Shelley and I keep the same kind of welcoming, high-and-tidy home. This all makes sense and explains “Like attracts like”.

On the other hand, I also like to hang out with people who are not like me. They give my life a little extra zip with their spontaneous, fun-loving chaos. And to be fair, Bob and I are not so, so alike. He tends towards hedonism while I cultivate an air of self-denial. I speak mostly in the declarative, and Bob is an accomplished questioner. And you only have to look at our desks to see one other telling difference. But these are traits, not values. And therein lies the difference. When two people have different traits, they balance each other out and this is just as important as seeing the world through similar lenses.

I believe that opposites attract on a primal and more physical level. Back in our tribal era, humans were compelled to expand their gene pool by selecting mates from other tribes. Otherwise we would be an inbred mess, easy victims for a bacteria or virus targeting our particular gene sequencing. So, when puberty began tugging at our hormones we often wandered outside our familiar circles. We set our sights on people who didn’t look or act like us and threw in with them. In this way we created diversity and ensured the success of our species.

Well, that about wraps it up. We have to think enough alike to get along, and act and look different enough to mix things up. And so, both adages, “Like Attracts Like,” and “Opposites Attract” are true and not at all mutually exclusive.

Even so, the minute Michael mentioned the man, Pete Curran’s face popped into my mind. They were in the war together, Michael informed me, which made sense because it seems that face has been part of my memory bank forever. Searching for my earliest memory associated with Peter’s face, I settled on an enormous house on the hill outside of Norvelt, Pennsylvania. We moved from that house when I was three years old.

Peter Curran was “a professor of mathematics at Fordham for nearly five decades”, according to his obituary in Fordham News. We moved from the Eastern Seaboard when I was sixteen, and I am pretty sure I have not seen him since. Yet, his face is still easily retrieved from my memory vaults.

Our ability to remember faces is astonishing, especially these days when no one can remember a phone number, or what they just finished reading on their Facebook news feed. I search my brain for the right word when I speak, and carry a notebook to record all the little things I think of during the day. One minute it’s in my brain, and the next it has evaporated.

I was sweeping the pine bark off the sidewalk at work this morning, chasing an errant thought, and a different thought popped into my head. Maybe we have trouble remembering things as we age because there are so many faces stored in our brains. Back in college anthropology class, I learned about Koko, a gorilla with an impressive vocabulary of 2,000 words. One piece of Koko’s story stood out. At 2,000 words, she was still able to pick up new words, but for every new word learned, she forgot an old one.

It is common knowledge that although our world is very different from the world of our cave people ancestors, humans have not evolved much physiologically. Our knees, unused to jogging and other extreme sports, break down with alarming frequency. We still crave sugar, salt, and fat. And we probably only have room in our brains for a couple hundred faces. Problem is, we meet thousands of people in our lifetimes, all of whose feature our eyes expertly scan and sock away for future retrieval. Survival depends on knowing the difference between strangers and our tribe.

Dad’s old army buddy died last April, a few days after my father’s 92nd birthday. I may have trouble remembering Peter Curran’s name, or much about the year I lived in Norvelt, or even what I had for dinner last night, but his face, a face I have not seen for close to fifty years lives on in my mind’s eye. I am certain both my father and I will be able to call up this face, and many others until we draw our last breath.

“That looks a little better,” I think, nudging a weed-laden wheelbarrow south towards the brush pile. It’s turned hot, and my ponytail is stuck to the back of my neck. My friends are staying cool inside their offices, and I remind myself I planned on leaving work a couple of hours ago. Fifty feet down Lorax Lane, I stop at another garden and step out from between the worn wooden handles. Might as well pretty this bed up, too. Only a handful of weeds.

A wheelbarrow a day keeps the weeds at bay, that’s my motto. I pluck out everything that doesn’t belong: henbit, chickweed, vetch, and sedge. Despite the sweat bee pestering my left ear, I am sure I’ve got the best job on this sixteen acre eco-industrial/beverage-district business park.

As property manager of The Plant, I pull weeds, and cultivate relationships by chatting people up: curious strangers, co-workers, tenants, their employees and customers, contractors, and volunteers. We talk about everything, from shallow to deep, and over the years I’ve taken note of conversational trends. For a while it was the lingering “so..” at the end of an explanatory clause. Then the word “goddess” began cropping up. And lately, ADD and OCD.

I’ve heard so many people refer to “their ADD” I wonder if Attention Deficit Disorder hasn’t become a national badge of courage. I can’t tell if they are bragging or complaining, if they are proud of their ability to multi-task, or if they are looking for an excuse for lack of follow-through. Either way, I can relate because I’m easily sidetracked, too. Others label themselves OCD, and a few have implied they think I suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. They have a point. I do indulge my need to get things done just so.

At home, I keep the same steady, yet fragmented pace. I’ll start to sweep the porch, then notice a weed, which reminds me to harvest some lettuce, and then to check the sourdough rising on the kitchen counter.

Bob and I are hard-wired incrementalists. We believe in the power of the small job. Because we find big jobs arduous and taxing, we prefer to tackle things before they balloon out of control. I’d rather haul the recycling in my car once a week than wait a couple of months and have to borrow a truck. Bob plants his garden one or two flats at a time, not all twenty at once.

While some glory in the occasional Herculean effort, I celebrate multiple daily victories as I chew through my list of small tasks. One bed mulched. Line-dried sheets. Tomorrow’s casserole assembled today. It makes me feel put together, in control, on top of things, and provided for. All tasks add to our quality of life: good home grown food, fresh flowers, and uncluttered horizontal space.

Despite prevailing evidence, I am neither OCD nor ADD. My pursuit of order is not a disorder; it is the essence of the good life. Seeing things that need fixed and fixing them right now is not a deficiency – it’s the opposite of procrastination. Losing myself in the minutia of everyday life is my path to nirvana. At the end of each day I sink into my heavenly bed, satisfied I’ve made a lot of things a little better.