A new start in late Autumn.

Some things never change; some things are constantly changing. The sun, the ocean, the mountains appear permanent and fixed compared to the lives of crabs, birds, insects, man.  While everything around us was turning inside out and upside down, all of which was most welcome, we were changing in ways neither of us had predicted.  The "us" were my husband and I, married 43 years, almost divorced a dozen times.  We found ourselves playing at the Ocean as the girls in this picture, with  abandon and joy, feeling as though we just met, late January 1966.

With each major change in our lives, we had been bruised badly. We blamed the world and each other. Silently. I even had a few escape clauses in my pocket. If I divorced, I would move back to Italy with the children, find a job, save like heck to send them back to visit their father, and would worry. Worry that they would miss their father, their culture and their language so much that they would choose to live with him. I would then grow old and bitter and blame myself for everything. 

These thoughts were present after each argument, after each misunderstanding.

After forty years, arguments bruise less and less. We learn to predict when the other is too tired, or too worried. We learn to stay out of the wind and the rain whenever possible.  We give in to the other's need even when our need is all we could feel.

The need to be together became stronger than the need to be right. 

This new stage of life in retirement had its own brand of challenges. We were about to learn more about each other, more about habits.

Mostly, we rediscovered  Joy.


...stay tuned...more to follow... joy, pleasure, cooking from scratch........................

Adjusting: the other side of Heaven

We experience these flowers differently when up  close than when we view them from above.  When we stop working, we see the world in a new light.

I loved my work, but I didn't realize that it was killing me, slowly grinding me down to a pulp. It took all I had; it became who I was through and through, day and night, year in, year out.  In the last decade, before I retired, I was a school principal in a middle school, on the outskirts of L.A, working a seventy-hour week and loving every minute of it.

We don't realize how much a job defines us until it is behind us.  We had Sunday dinners at my house with all our children, two of whom are teachers, and the conversation usually moved to some aspect of education. My husband and the two spouses found this phenomenon tiring and boring; they intercepted conversations, interrupted with funny anectodes of something or other. But the conversation never really changed.  The educators in the room were educating everybody else about their passion. The air around us didn't smell of the lasagna or beef roast of the day; the air smelled of chalky  rooms, angry parents, maladjusted teens, victimized children, inept bureaucracies, lack of resources, abundance of violence, neglect, dirt and graffiti. We talked about our lives as though on a mission from God, and everybody else better stand back.

Suddenly without my reason for being, I had nothing to talk about. When I retired, I had nothing else. Literally. When I worked, I read newspapers and magazines just to have a brief experience with the world around me. I had no time for hobbies or interests, for reading or writing that was not related to my work. Even on vacation, I was writing lesson plans, visiting with local educators, comparing notes.

Life had been ordered, organized and precise, dictated by a school bell and a school calendar.

Now, hubby and I found ourselves together twenty-four hours a day, with nothing to talk about.

Stay tuned, our honeymoon was starting.