Double Life

If you’re in the leading edge of our boomer generation, maybe you’re also living, or at least contemplating a two home existence like Meredith Jordan’s. If you are, she writes, you’ll probably learn that you have to give something up to gain something else in your new Double Life.

Because I’m now living what I’ve come to call a bi-furcated life, I missed The Big One, the late April 2007 storm that slammed into coastal Maine, downed power lines to hundreds of thousands of people, and took down trees and tree limbs that have survived more ferocious storms than this. It ate away feet of beach sand, sucked it right back into the ocean depths, and toppled houses into the briny sea. I sat it all out, watching from afar, in sunny Sarasota where, that same day, the worst weather we had was a few hours of downpour and some tornado warnings. I’ll be on my way north again when hurricane season begins here.

This is an odd, and oddly satisfying, way to live. The best of it is that most days, I wake up to sunshine and blooming hibiscus trees. As a person whose deep old soul is nourished by what E.E. Cummings called “the greenly things,” I am in love with nature, although as I grow older my love takes its best cues from a temperate climate.

In Florida, I have a garden from January to April, when in Maine my garden still is in deep hibernation. In Florida, I spent the last several weekends painting my new garden bench a deep marine blue and found myself thinking that “Painting the Garden Bench” would make a wonderful title for a poem. In Maine, I would have been warding off the cold raw weather by gritting my teeth and reading garden catalogs. Flowers would be just photographs. Here, flowers are alive, bright and cheerful. I love the moment when I walk into my writing room in the early morning — just after taking the pup for her morning constitutional where she joyfully leaps and spins and twirls to greet every moving animal or human body — to see the one sparkle of dew on a red hibiscus blossom just feet away from where I sit to write.

The hardest part of this not-too-hard-to-take life is that now I am saying my goodbyes to the friends I have grown to love here, people who come from all parts of the country and have a remarkable array of talents honed in the school of life. They are fascinating, funny, gifted people I’d love to pop into the back of my red VW Beetle and take north with me to meet my fascinating, funny, gifted friends and family there.

I can’t do that. They have their own lives and journeys to make. So I say goodbye every spring not knowing what the next six months will hold, and whether we’ll all be here again next year when the weather up north develops that certain bone chill in the air that won’t go away and whispers, “Go south!”

In many ways, this bi-furcated life is a great blessing, and I am deeply grateful to have the latitude to make it work. In others, it’s hard on the heart: this busness of living and loving in two places, yet never the twain shall meet. How can it be that Deborah might never meet Linda, or Marvin will never know Robert, or Bob won’t be at my son’s wedding in August?

Confusing, this.

And I pack today, getting the car and the pup ready for my daughter’s arrival and our long drive back to New England, with an array of mixed feelings. I look at the hibiscus, once more twinkling with morning dew, and already feel its absence. Yet I hear from Sarah that the Star Magnolia we planted at her Flower Power Shower last summer is just about to burst into bloom, and I (who picked it out) want to be there for the luscious grand opening.

Some say we can have it all. Some that we can have it all, but not all at once or all the time. I don’t know where I stand on this. I simply know that I love many people and many different places, and with each, my spirit is deeply nourished. That I have to say goodbye to some in order to have others, is … well … a part of life I don’t like very much. At least, I get to say goodbye in ways that do my heart good. So many people have their loved ones parted from them with no warning. I have had months to savor the pleasures of them and hours to linger over our gratitudes and leavetakings. That must be enough.

More time is what I surrender in order to have the rich colors, textures, and diversity of people to love. But with more flexibility now in this post-working boomer life, I can.