…then second daughter’s new home and I think what every parent must think when the stars are looking bright: man, they are doing okay! Soon, they can take care of me!
I asked one of them if she would, indeed look after me were I penniless and destitute in my old age. She smiled benevolently and said -- yes, even if you are penniless and destitute because you travel so much…
In the afternoon I clean the apartment that one daughter is vacating so that nothing is taken away from her security deposit. It is an old and creaky place and there is a lot of cleaning to do. I am reminded how awful it was to clean the house that I was vacating exactly a year ago. A house that overwhelmed me. A house that had dust in corners I never knew existed.
That was one of the worst moments of my days – that godawful first half of last September, as I packed to leave a house which had overwhelmed me in all ways. (Again, thank you to all those who helped me get through that move. Thank you especially Susanne and Sarah and Sep.)
I remember last year so well. On September 1st I bottomed out. I was passing through New Haven on my way back from Boston and I crashed. I sat in a bar, just under the apartment my daughter is now moving into and I flirted outrageously with some local attorney and I wont even say how outrageous I was, but it was definitely the low point of all low points.
But time passes and new things happen. And here I am, in New Haven again, looking around the spaces inhabited by my daughters and thinking – man, you two are doing alright…
And ahead of me, just a few weeks ahead, I have some returns – to places that gave me such a beautiful fresh perspective on everything – to Languedoc, to the vineyards that allowed me to let go of so much tension, to the little wineries that I grew to love, to all those places, now beginning their fall harvest, a harvest I want to see with my own eyes.
Sorry for being so wordy. I just was remembering September 1st last year and thinking how quickly a bad string of days can flip their noodle and become a good string of days.
