Getting Ready
But never quite
Astonishing to mark 26 years of semi-annual cross-continent migration. Because we rent in California, we’ve had to find 3, and now 4, different places that would rent to us for the winter months.
Though the last 2 places (and the upcoming 4th for next winter) have been furnished, they’re furnished with generic appointments suitable for short-term renters. We have pared down to what we consider the minimum pieces needed to make the places feel as if we inhabit them, when the time comes to move out, and six months later move in, requires a fair amount of organizing, packing, loading and unloading into the storage unit.
Hard to say whether the extra effort it seems to require as we age, trumps our having become pretty accomplished at the logistics. It’s a lot of work.
My circadian clock has adjusted to moving from one place to the other. Life in the tiny, rural village in our 1830 farmhouse is as different from the busy, crowded, fast-paced life on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, as chalk is from cheese.
As days lengthen my body begins to long for the uncrowded dirt roads and the startling spring green as everything embraces the return of the sun’s energy.
Much as I long for the change I never seem to be quite ready. My stress escalates, sleep becomes evasive and my mood becomes edgy.
Freud thought this restlessness is about the dread of and longing for death. I don’t think death awareness is ever buried as deep in our unconscious as we’d like. When you’re over 80 you wonder how many more migrations you may have in you.
Ready? I hope when the time comes to die I may be more ready. But I doubt I will be. It’s been a lovely run, this life that has been given to me, and I though I have spent my entire adult life trying to learn how to see death as the corollary to birth, and as a parish priest have ushered countless people into eternity, it will remain and elusive a mystery as birth is, until I die.