According to my "Countdown" widget on my android phone...

...there are 220 days left until the day I retire.  That's actual days..  not workdays.   My friend Madeleine is retiring the same day I am.  She and I went out for sushi today, being that it's Monday and I have transitioned to three days a week.  We sat on my patio afterwards, eating our "no-sugar added" fudgsicles, watching the fish, and dreaming about all of the things we will do.  We will join the garden club, we will take pottery classes, we will wrap up all those unfinished projects lingering in our upstairs guest rooms, including that project to clean up and turn the guest room back into the bedroom it used to be when the kids were at home.  We will lose pounds and gain muscle, and we'll get denser bones for all our effort.  We will fire the maids and the gardeners and do it all ourselves..   oh wait..  we don't have maids and gardeners.  Well..  we will whip our gardens, our bodies, and our guestrooms into shape, and then we'll play bridge.   Or Mahjong.  Or maybe get a part time jobs.

 

I graduated from high school when I was 17 and went to live on a farm - a hospice for the poor in the hills of West Virginia.  Okay, okay.  It was a hippie commune.  It was hard work and I didn't like it.  I liked the goats, especially the kids, but then we ate them and I didn't like that either.   I came home, got an office job, left for college in the fall and never lived at home again.  On the week I retire, it will have been 40 years since the day I left home to go live in West Virginia.   The twists and turns leading me from then and there to here and now seem remarkably complicated.  To my children it probably looks like straight lines from this, to that, to that, to here.  They are only beginning to understand the anxiety of trying to navigate this twisty old stream, and they are still years from knowing when to hold on and just let the river carry you.