Don't just do something --sit there!

This year has wrought a lot of changes, and some of them have been major subtractions from our family's life. I already wrote about how I was going to give Halloween a miss, and HS and I talked about Thanksgiving, well ahead of time, better that way, and what we might like to do this year.

The idea of setting a table here for two, with all the cooking and the sadly missing person was just too hard to manage, so we decided we'd be a lot happier going out for Thanksgiving. HS and I used to celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving, back when HP and I were not together, by going out, and it will be nice to revive that this year, for several reasons. And when I had the petcare business, Christmas was one of my busiest days of the entire year, not unusual to work 18 hours straight, so HS agreed very flexibly that we would declare Christmas on a day we could take the time to enjoy it.

Likewise my birthday this year will be a restaurant event, and I don't know what we will do for Christmas this year. Maybe we'll have it on a different day or something. I just feel as if it's better to have a day with no sad echoes in it, at least for this year. And I feel very good about it, interestingly. It's about creating something new, rather than just compensating for what we've lost.

Daily no-stuff is working out too. The utter peace of no television unless I put on a DVD of something I really want to see, no commercials even the polite public tv ones. Radio tuned to the classical music station, no endless, tedious highbrow political discussions. Laundry once a week instead of twice daily. No phone ringing except the rare times my cell goes. These are new subtractions that I savor. Utility bill half the size of what it was when HP's equipment and other needs required a lot of power.

A couple of long-married women friends have asked me if I am nervous alone in the house, and they're surprised that I'm not at all, never have been, even in client houses where I used to stay overnights with pets, in huge mansiony places with grounds and general remoteness. This is a new concept for them, I think, since it's one of the things people ask about right away, as I'm getting used to being single here again.

On the other hand, I've always done things alone, pretty fearlessly, from going to France at age 18, alone, to find a job in order to get my French fluent enough for the very tough degree program I was going to enter several months later. Or when I went away to work at age sixteen, for my summer vacation from school, just to get away somewhere, anywhere! I found that you always make new friends, and being alone isn't at all the same thing as being lonely. I'm looking to make new friends now, as well as nurture old ones, since at this age, friends start to disappear in the course of nature.

Anyway, these are late October thoughts!