Stepping Off Cliffs and Other Acts of Midlife

I didn’t even tell my closest friends until I was absolutely sure. After all, there is no turning back from a decision of this magnitude. Either you’re on the bus or not.

The first person I confide in is my hair stylist.

“I’m moving to Vermont!” I holler over the cacophony of blow-dryers and snarky conversations.

“Are you gonna open a bed and breakfast?”

Okay, cliché, but a fair assumption.

Vermont at my age—okay, fifty and change—must mean I feel a need to reinvent myself, right? Leave behind the expensive highlights, the freeway traffic and slip into a more relaxed lifestyle. Maybe my stylist pictures me all Birkenstocks and crows feet, serving homemade apple cinnamon scones to chatty empty nesters up to leaf peep from Long Island.

Perish the thought.

I am moving three thousand miles to a smudge of a town on the Connecticut River, but it’s not to open a B&B and go native as a drum-beating earth mother. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not against the principle of reinvention. I just don’t have the time.

You see, the real reason I’m moving to Vermont is to paste my snapshots from the last 15 years into photo albums before I forget if that kayak trip was in 2003 or 2004, and if the river was the Rogue in Oregon or the Winooski in Vermont.

Already, the memories of family holidays, like the curling photos from the era of 35mm cameras, are getting smashed and a little bit stuck together.

Deep in the Vermont woods, isolated from city life distractions and with the doors sealed shut by snowdrifts, I’ll be that organized person I’ve always dreamed of becoming. Like the ones who write articles entitled “De-Clutter Once and For All!” and “Be Organized in Ten Minutes a Day!” Heck, it takes me ten minutes just to find my glasses in the morning.

The photos are packed now—in no particular order—inside big, bright plastic tubs marked “Photos & Memorabilia.” There are 31 tubs in all. I do the math silently as my stylist removes the foil from my hair.

Empty 31 tubs, spread out contents on dry, clean football field-sized surface: 40 hours. Spiders and other arthropodish hitchhikers from California stomped and disposed of: one hour. Arranging photos chronologically, based on amount of baby fat in children’s faces: 72 hours. Visit to Emergency Room to treat spider bite: six hours. Waiting in line at pharmacy for antibiotics: one hour. Reminiscing (replete with nose-blowing) about the days my children worshiped their mommy: interminable.

The heck with it; maybe I will open a bed and breakfast.