Retirement

The day after I posted those last few blogs, I got busy and cleaned up the house. I don't want to live like a pig after all. I'm thinking that I'm actually lucky that I have some work left to do. My sister called me recently and told me that her husband's retirement, which had been scheduled for this summer, suddenly happened NOW. They had looked for a house in Aiken, South Carolina and immediately found one that they really liked. Then they had a chance to sell their current home quickly, and suddenly it was all done. She's really excited about it all. She mentioned that she had read some of my blogs and that, "It sounds like you two have so much fun up there." The thought that quickly crossed my mind was, "Gee, I hope I didn't mislead her." My husband and I do have a lot of fun up here and I think we have become closer than we have ever been during this last decade. And yet,... I had a group of friends in the town where we formerly lived. We went to Bible class and Altar Guild together and almost every month went out to eat to celebrate each other's birthdays. One of the friends worked in her husband's office. When they both retired, she carried on so about it that the rest of us got thoroughly fed up with her. Now I think I understand better. I didn't actually retire from anything, but sharing my husband's retirement was a much more difficult transition than I had expected. For a long time it seemed to me that all the people in Northwest Minnesota were busy living their lives except for the two of us. We were just standing by and watching. Once, after a concert we had attended, a woman came up to us and said, "I don't think I've seen you before. I don't know who you are." My husband replied, "That's all right. We don't really know who we are anymore either." We had lost our identity and didn't know how or where to find a new one. It's often an empty feeling, a purposeless seeming process. On other days, I feel so unbelievably lucky to be living exactly the life I've wanted to. The purpose is to start winding down, I guess. Ambiguity.