Countdown

Seven days! 168 hours. 10,080 minutes. 604,800 seconds. 604,799. . . 604,798 . . . 604,797. . . Yikes! I am not at all sure I will be ready to leave Connecticut, my apartment, my job in a mere seven days! My tick lists of stuff to take care of are long and complicated. Sometimes you have to delay doing one thing until another is finished. Sometimes you don't get through on the first try. Sometimes you think you have taken care of things only to discover that something went awry and you have to get back to square one and begin again. Wow!

It makes me give a lot of thought to how I want to set things up once we get to Rochester. Organization, communication, tracking, developing better ways to manage things seems very advisable at the moment. But I am sure in the rush of setting up, I will lose that perspective and end up letting things slide by willy-nilly in an attempt to get up to speed quickly.

I often think life used to be so much simpler. I clearly remember sitting in my Grandmother's side yard after dinner of a summer's evening, watching the iris nod in the breeze, hearing the occasional car go by on Route 50, climbing a tree and hanging from the lower limb, listening to the adults make small talk - or not - while the crickets sang the pitch of heat for the day and the birds twittered about.

But then I remember that indoor plumbing is fairly recent, that old fashioned ice boxes required a lot of attention, that people died from diseases that don't exist anymore. Trips to town were all day affairs and shopping happened only once or twice a month. You made your own clothes, you cooked everything "from scratch" and no body went to the doctor unless you were pretty much dying.

The pace of life is what you make it I suppose. Yes, there are more choices these days, more activities, more stuff to be had. But no one is holding a gun to my head and telling me to do it all. I have downsized for this move, and I believe I will stay downsized. Choose simpler, choose less. Another library employee is leaving here to be closer to family, and she and I were comparing notes about moving. She has lived here much longer than I, and has a larger living space. She is leaving a lot of things with her son who is staying in the area. We agreed that you can live with much less than one accumulates.

Cancer patients have a saying, "Better life through chemicals." I believe I am going to adopt a new saying. "Better life with less." Makes a lot of sense. Now if I can just figure out which box has the scissors in it. . .