On Closed and Opened:

When you read this I will be on the road because I put it on a timer today.

I’m all geared up and raring to go on my trip. Not for the trip itself, but for the getting there. It is good to see the world your kids live in every once in a while. Thou distance is hard on me in this.

We started bright and early before the sun came up over the horizon. Half way there I will be handed off to my daughter’s care to drive the rest of the six and a half hour trip to her apartment in Boston.

Mountain Man will go back home to the dogs and the one place I’ve lived longer then any other on earth. Home.

I grew up just three miles from New York City in New Jersey. I know how to act in city life, but I don’t for one second miss it. I have always been a country girl at heart. I sought out the older neighbors who still knew how to can veggies and sew their own clothing as a child to learn those things that were fast becoming a lost art in the once, stay at home mothers world, for the starting to go to work mothers metropolis, all be it suburbia, I lived in.

I will not be lost in the city even if I loose my way, but I will feel like a child again.

I am used to knowing when my neighbors are up to something. Not because I am nosey or the closeness of their houses. But from the quite and distance. I can hear the differences in the silence of the day. A hammer thudding from the west. A mower starting to the north. The motorcycle of the neighbors kid roaring to life or quieting down on return. The dogs let me know when the meter reader is coming long before the truck comes up the drive. I am open to the movement of life here.

At home I am open to even the turn of the wind. In the city I must be closed and distant in a crowd. Ignorant to and of the people and sounds around me because they are none of my business. A shrunken cosmos of a world that moves much too fast and lonely for me to be part of for long.

For the next week I’ll see the sights and catch a museum if I have the time. I may even meet an internet friend or two in my travels. My blinders will be on for the duration and my smile will be less free and easy on my face. But my goal is to enjoy it and then go home.

Home, to unfurl and be open to life’s subtle movements once again.