It’s hard to believe it’s been a month since I retired. Weirdly, I feel as if I’ve lived a year already.
I’ve been able to spend quality time with family and friends, I’ve enjoyed seeing my poetry made into art, and Parkher, my 2019 Ford Explorer, and I have traveled more than 5,000 miles. We’ve seen sunsets and storms, sunrises and sprinkles…and a lot of beautiful country between Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota.
It still feels a little like I’m on an extended vacation, but I’m embracing the change. I even took an afternoon nap a few days ago, something I could never do before.
Like a migrating bird, I’ll start traveling south in the next month just as my retired parents did. I am my father’s daughter in so many ways, and I feel his presence on this nomad journey…”Be sure to log your mileage and the cost of gas. And how many miles to the gallon you get.”
“It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.”
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
I didn’t hate my day job, but it seemed every day brought an onslaught of challenges.
I did, however, like the people I worked with and loved the routine the work week ushered in. I knew I only had so much time outside my work hours to get other work and writing done, motivating me to use and structure my time well.
This retirement thing is going to take some getting used to. Right now, it still feels like I’m on vacation. It’s a challenge to get into any writing done when I’m traveling.
So I’ll just have to steal moments of time until I settle into a routine that suits me. Meanwhile, adventure awaits…and I’ll be posting photos of some of my favorite places.
When I wrote poetry in the late 1990s, I wanted to publish a book of poems called Solitary Sojourns and Everyday Epiphanies. I never did, so I’ve started a new Instagram profile called SolitarySojourns where I share photos from my travels and thoughts on this, my sixth decade of living in a meat suit on this beautiful, blue spinning marble in the cosmos. My blog will become more of a photoblog while I focus my writing on finishing my memoir so I can move onto other things…and more adventures.
In 1974 at the age of 15, I started working for 75 cents an hour grading papers for a high school teacher.
“Be a secretary, you’ll always have something to fall back on,” my father told me. His advice bit me in the butt a few years later when as an Army Reservist 1976, I applied to be in the first class of women to be admitted to West Point. I missed the age cut-off by one year because I needed a year of prep school.
I’ve lost track of the number of jobs I’ve had over the years: medical clerk typist, pharmacy tech, “Officer Friendly” in military police community relations, C-130 cargo plane loader, publishing manager, small business owner, production control analyst, realtor…and secretary.
Sometimes I felt sentenced to being a secretary because I’d boomerang back yet again. Now, after all these years and perspective, it was an awesome way to get my foot in the door of some solid, well-respected companies. I’ve made the most of that opportunity the last 11 years and am grateful to have been able to bookend my career with the Army, first as a 19-year-old reservist and now as a retired civil servant.
I retired from my day job today. It’s going to take some time for that reality to sink in…but it definitely feels good.
I’ve been intending to write a post for the past month and a half, but I’ve been busy preparing to leave my home base to travel back to Michigan to work my final days in the office. It’s been a whirlwind.
As of today, I’m down to three days and a wake-up which seems surreal…but it’s finally here. Although my shoulder surgery delayed and changed my plans, if life has taught me nothing else it’s how to be resilient.
I’m grateful to be blessed with friends who have opened their homes to me during this interim period. I plan to hit the road and be a nomad for time, meandering where the spirit moves me, then winter in Tucson.
The comfort zone is a psychological state in which one feels familiar, safe, at ease, and secure. You never change your life until you step out of your comfort zone; change begins at the end of your comfort zone.
Roy T. Bennett
Tracking the US cases became a daily obsession in the early days. This was from 13 March 2020
This month I’ve struggled with how to process the last year. I’ve wanted to write a post remembering the last week of normal life before the world shut down. The sign in CVS saying they were sold out of isopropyl alcohol and antiseptic wipes. The lines of worried patrons pushing toilet-paper topped carts down grocery aisles waiting to check out. Feeling foolish wearing a mask for the first time, like I was playing cops and robbers.
Shit got real for me when I heard Tom Hanks had Covid-19.
Michigan locked down, we were third in the nation for covids deaths, and every day seemed more surreal than the last. Each lockdown day was marked on the calendar, as if I was doing time. I dyed my hair purple. I doomscrolled social media searching for the coronavirus cavalry and watched a young woman in YouTube videos explaining the pandemic to her past self…and was horrified when she asked what year it was.
As the telework days turned into months and Spring turned to Summer in the chaos that was my personal life, I tried to hike every day at the state park across the street to prevent the walls from closing in. I needed something to look forward to so I set a retirement date of 31 July 2021. I moved closer to family to have a home base and quit numbering the lockdown days on the calendar.
Searching for and buying a home via Facetime turned out easier than I imagined, and packing up and selling the home across from the state park I loved to hike was gut wrenching. Having worked from home with a lockdown mentality, it was tough having people in my home getting it ready for sale, but it had to be done.
I was nervous about traveling because the last thing I wanted was to catch was the virus. With the Uhaul hitched to my Outback, I headed to my new life, and spent a restless night in a hotel halfway there, the first since being locked down.
Moving back to North Dakota in September, it seemed as if people were in denial about coronavirus and I felt like I was living in an alternate reality. The first weekend in my new home, the neighbor across the street with the Trump signs in her yard wanted to have a gathering of the neighborhood ladies to get to know my daughter and I.
“Where would we have the gathering?”
“In my Living Room.”
“I don’t really feel comfortable with that. I just moved from Michigan where we had refrigerator trucks parked outside hospitals.”
“Well, by October can be pretty cold. I guess we can play it by ear.”
The Friday before the Sunday gathering, my neighbor called to say she had Covid and the gathering had been delayed. I was relieved. Shortly after, local cases skyrocketed and the state hit the national news becoming North Dacovid. I questioned whether I had made the right decision to move back to my home state.
The upsides of the move were the first holidays spent with family in decades and access to great medical care when my daughter had emergency surgery in December. I had spent months avoiding people and hospitals, now I had to be there for my daughter. I focused my thoughts on her to avoid disaster-sizing the what ifs. My temperature was checked when I arrived at the hospital, they only let one visitor in at a time, everyone was masked, and they moved around like normal people in the land of the living. It was the beginning of starting to feel comfortable again out in the world, yet staying masked and protecting myself.
Hiking in the mountains near Tucson
I was so glad to put 2020 behind me, hoping that with retirement on the horizon 2021 would be a better year. After the national chaos that was January, February loomed large on the horizon with memories of Portland, the last trip I’d taken before the pandemic. I needed to step outside my comfort zone again.
I’d seen reports of people flying and I had an airline credit with Delta, which was still committed to social distancing. I booked a flight to Tucson, a place I visited in the past, had family and friends who wintered there, and thought it might be right for me in retirement. At least it would be an opportunity to enjoy a long weekend in the warmth of the Arizona sun.
Tucson was everything I remembered and more. With a higher elevation, hiking and bike trails surrounded by mountains, the RV resort with their tennis and pickleball courts, and activities of every kind got me hooked. In my short long weekend trip, I made plans to winter there myself.
Returning home, I set my sights on planning the rest of my retirement dream. I ordered a 16′ Scamp to be delivered in August 2022, then found a 1973 13′ Boler as an interim solution until my Scamp is ready. She’s one of 10K ultralight fiberglass campers that were manufactured in Canada between 1968 and 1988. I won’t have time to do extensive renovations before I hit the road, but the original upholstery is really quite groovy. And she’s light enough to tow with my Outback.
I filed my retirement paperwork and with plans in place, it was just a matter of tying up loose ends…but the nagging shoulder pain I’d been nursing since the move last Summer had other plans. After an MRI revealed tears in the right rotator cuff, an orthopedic surgeon gave me the option of surgery or taking a wait and see approach. I’ve got places to go, things to see, and I want to lead an active retirement with biking, pickleball, and camper hauling, so surgery is scheduled for Tuesday, March 30th.
Life without the use of my dominant arm isn’t the way I imagined the last few months of my working life, but better I get it taken care of so I can enjoy life on the road. I keep reminding myself it’s just another speed bump and growth opportunity. I’ve come through worse so I’m keeping my eye on the prize…an active retirement and a new goal. #ambidextrous
It’s almost time to open up the time capsule I buried with my family on the precipice of the 21st Century. When I broached the subject of opening it with my daughter, we talked about all the ways our lives have changed in the 20 years since we carefully packed it with things we wanted to remember. Our lives today look nothing like what we imagined when we sat in our off-grid California cabin and wrote letters to our future selves.
Photo at the center of the vision board I did 10 years ago
A vision board, on the other hand, is not the same as a time capsule. I first learned about vision boards in the early 1980s while taking a Women in Management course during my undergraduate years at California State University, Fullerton. We were to clip images and words from magazines that we were attracted to and bring them to class along with scissors, glue, and posterboard.
On vision board day, the professor instructed us to turn our posterboards over and write “My life in five years, <date>.” At the time, I was 27, divorced, going to school on the GI bill, and renting an apartment near campus. Interesting, I’ll play along, I thought while arranging the items I brought in.
I looked through more magazines to fill in the hopes and dreams I had for myself. I pictured myself with: a challenging career; married to a handsome man with a son, a daughter, a cat, and dog; and a beautiful home in the suburbs with a new car in the garage and a grand piano in the living room. I remember thinking it was a fun exercise, but I couldn’t imagine much use for it.
One day while cleaning more than six years later, I saw the vision board tucked behind my credenza. I pulled it out to my amazement, with the exception of a son and a dog, everything on that vision board had come true! Was it luck? Or was it the power of intention I had set in motion years earlier? I’ve created other vision boards over the years that have been equally as powerful…and I still have that grand piano.
My daughter recently asked if I wanted to create another time capsule with this new year, new decade. I’m hesitant. I’ll be 84 in another 20 years, so I may not be around when it’s time to open. But I’m definitely planning to do another vision board and this time, with a focus on my dreams and intentions for retiring from my day job. Who knows when that will happen…but I want to leave nothing to chance.
Never underestimate the power of dreams and intentions.
Deb Sinness, Author 