As an asthmatic kid in the Midwest, I was stuck in a steam-tent for days and weeks on end. My mom was busy, not only with keeping my room scrupulously free of dust, pollen, and germs, but also with my new baby brother. It was books that kept me company.
Most of the time, those books were set in places very different from my flat Midwestern suburb: some far to the northeast (Little Women, Anne of Green Gables), some across the ocean in rural England (The Secret Garden). The books weren’t just an escape from my trouble with breathing. They gave me stories of healing, growing, and growing up strong. They offered a glimpse of lives outside my steam-tent, where the pages of my books swelled up and curled from the damp, foggy heat. They also created visions of wild, foreign landscapes for my imagination to play in. Not surprisingly, as soon as I could figure out how to swing the finances, I tried to get to those places.
I did it, too. To my parents’ dismay, I took two years off college. I spent one year on a kibbutz in Israel (a cool way, I thought, for an aspiring Episcopal priest to learn Hebrew), another on an experimental religious commune in Scotland. Both these trips tested me, as I intended them to: I wanted to know if this bookish, asthmatic, middle-class Midwestern kid could adapt to very different ways of life and much more strenuous conditions. I returned to the United States with the confidence that I could steer my own ship. I could live poor if I needed to. I finished college, went to grad school, married (and divorced and remarried), helped raise a couple of step-kids, taught college and high school very happily for many years, and then. . . . Well, then suddenly I was sixty. The kids were done with college, so we were done with paying tuition. My hair had gone gray, my figure a little matronly. I loved my students and classes, but I loved other things, too. And when I looked down the path, there sat Retirement — a dark, amorphous giant squatting directly in the middle of it. On some days, he seemed to be glowering at me, arms crossed. What would that hulking shadow look like up close? For a while, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know. Then, early one winter evening after work, as my husband and I sat in front of the fire, sipping our wine and chatting about our days, we slipped into a conversation about it. We’d been over the practicalities before and knew we were going to be lucky enough to be okay financially. But what were we going to do with all that open time? I loved to read, but not all day. I loved to walk with friends, or bicycle if the weather was good. We were writing fiction part-time and wanted to keep doing that. We wanted to spend time with the kids and grandkids. That was all good. But. . . . It took me a while to formulate what about this list of happy activities was making me restless. Then suddenly I blurted out, “I don’t want my adventures to be over.” My husband looked startled. “Of course not,” he said. He paused, then nodded slowly. “So let’s do a little dreaming.” Dreaming led to planning and traveling. We went to Paris and Barcelona; we spent a week in the Cinque Terre, along the “Italian Riviera,” another week in Lake Como, another week in Florence. By the time I was sixty-five, we had decided to mark our retirements by living in Florence for six weeks the fall after we stopped working. It would be an experiment, a celebration, and an adventure — all of it very consciously done in granny gear.