Actually, some of them do. But it’s not the usual thing for women in middle age – or I don’t hang out with the right women. Those women and I seem to be infected with the same need for motion that sends men out for sports cars. We contemplate running away from home; we consider selling our houses, we may have left spouses, or seen one zoom off in that red Corvette to some trophy wife or alternate lifestyle. We feel impelled to give away all our treasures, or start a new collection. We drop a group of friends and look for new ones. But we don’t seem to buy Corvettes.
My friend Amy and I fantasize about owning a loft in NYC, just to be there three months a year. Now that would be a change from SUV suburbia in the Bible Belt. “Selling New York” on HGTV has much to answer for: When the realtor shows the view – all skyscraper and sky – from some downtown condo window (costing only millions more than will ever be in my bank account) – I suddenly feel I need that place, that life, that movement, that noise, that trendy urban scene. I would look as out of place as a hippo in a birdbath, but this reality matters nothing to my impulse. The inner me – the one who is younger, thinner, richer, and still has every option open – now wants that condo, despite years of choosing not to take the train into Chicago when visiting the Illinois in-laws only an hour downstate. Even Amy, who paints as well as writes, and who used to dream of a retreat in Taos or Santa Fe, has this new need to change something –even if it’s just to change one fantasy location for another.
I recently discovered that someone I met in an online writing group did move to NY. Her name popped up in facebook as someone I might want to befriend, and on her page is her location: NY, NY. I don’t think she looks at facebook much; I haven’t heard anything back, but I know she probably left behind her adult children and new grandbaby (well, new when I knew her five years ago) in South Carolina or Kentucky, or wherever she used to be, someplace Southern, someplace not all that far from Arkansas – especially culturally. A little more googling and digging and I ran into an online interview she did with Gregory Maguire, and I saw that she is a member of a NYC writing group. She acted on that urge to move and is living her fantasy life, or so I gather. I don’t know if it has met her every expectation, but I am impressed.
I think about all this while picking the penultimate batch of blackberries in the rain in my backyard. Maybe the restlessness comes from knowing our established routines so well; we’ve been plotting our paths for years. Because we each move along a given trajectory for so long, drastic change, change that we fantasize about, would require something extraordinary in escape velocity. Catastrophes or miracles might move us, though sometimes the depth of the rut is scary enough to catapult someone out. Most of us don’t figure that the Corvette alone would do anything much, aware of the web of home and relationship that roots us here. And some of us buy the minivan instead of the Corvette (to haul the grandkids around), or remodel the house instead of buying the bachelor pad out of town (to accommodate an older parent’s moving in), having grown attuned to the needs of the family’s generations.
This is not New York, although it has its own joys. The blackberries are almost done for the season, but the pears – a larger than normal crop – have yet to ripen. My movement towards the new is liable to be slower, less pronounced, a subtle shift of microdegrees in my course rather than the about face or the right turn. Next year I’m putting in blueberries, and when my husband and I get my car paid off, maybe I’ll get a hybrid.
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