Retirement

There are some people who are content with the color of the sky and don’t long for a

hurricane or a different season.

They like the color white and are not tempted by cerulean blue or inky black or radically red.

I see these people, and I am filled with green and bitter and my heart

constricts like a squeezed lemon.

How nice and easy to wake up in the morning and say to yourself “Oh yes, another day just

like yesterday, how lovely.”

The garden wraps its green, shiny leaves around them each morning when they sit on a

bench, already dressed, and contemplate the street outside their house watching their neighbors walking by from 7:00 AM on with their dogs: Harry, Freddy, Rosie, Sadie, Stanley, Petunia.

The order of the dogs passing is often shuffled like a worn pack of cards, but the dogs

themselves remain the same, and even the birds are always repeaters.

Tonight meatloaf will be made or a nice juicy pork chop with some rice and green

beans and they will sit in the kitchen with their husbands or wives with the television on.

Everything is kept in neutral.

It’s very quiet in their minds.

The presence of a backup team is clear.

Wishing for the mundane is appealing but

hoping for adaptation

is impossible for me.

I will always long for the hurricane to come,

for the violent earthquake, the king tide, screams from the house next-door.

Brought up with adrenaline mixed into my milk, the rush of sudden change, the danger of a wet highway, sudden phantom pain, all feel like home to me

Even though I’m old now, I yearn for the unexpected: the shiny penny found in the foliage, a love letter in the mailbox, an early crocus peeping out from behind the pine bark mulch, soft and sweet.

I yearn for these things because they remind me I am still alive.

.