Years ago, my Beacon Hill friends and I spent nights drinking beer and bullshitting about numerous topics. One that came up frequently was where we planned on living when – and where you add your favorite condition – you got that great job, became famous as a folksinger, married wealthy, you know, dream stuff.
Sometimes, the folks got a bit too into this. Arguments would spring up over the natural superiority of, say, San Francisco over Taos. Now, you need to understand that these folks usually knew squat about these places. They had read magazine articles and reports and watched movies. The lack of a kernel of actual knowledge did not slow their verbiage one iota. Only a lack of beer signaled the end of the evening.
Few ever did more than a vacation in any of these spots. Years later most continued to live within a hundred miles of where we sat drinking in the Harvard Gardens, on Beacon Hill, in Boston, Massachusetts. For most, the farthest they had traveled was during any time they spent in the military. Of the group, only my best friend and I had spent time as Pious Itinerants. Unlike our friends, we could cover our backpacks in decals and stickers from all the locales we had wound up in.
Retirement finally broke the habit of locality. Friends broke a lifetime of residence to trek off to Florida, Arizona and locales with less bitter climates than New England.
Many now live in places where hillsides and mountains do not turn bright colors in the fall, and the woods are not a wonderland of snow, drooping pine boughs after the first heavy storms of December, and maple syrup scenes in early spring also are lacking.
I have been working on a lovely Christmas present for them. It’s a screensaver of favorite scenes. Now, they can see the beautiful colors of fall, the storms of winter, and the early spring woods. All without the pain of endless leaves to rake, snow to shovel, or hours spent trudging sap buckets to boil.
Gee, the endless storm season in Florida just started to seem pretty good to me. No raking, shoveling, or sloppy tracking through mud and ice. What am I thinking?
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