Alone but not Lonely

This morning while struggling with the beginning of a scarf I'm crocheting for hire, I heard a hawk call, very close. I keep my binoculars in a basket near the sofa in our sunroom, along with Peterson's Eastern Birds, so I grabbed the binocs and headed out into the chill that a cold front had brought to south Louisiana. There was the hawk, circling in the sky, then plunging downward to perch upon the broken limb of a dead tree. Early this summer, a pair of hawks nested in the same area and watched over their juvenile's soaring and diving in this little patch of woods near a creek, just minutes from the paved parking lots of big box stores of the nearest town of any size.

I live in an old cottage in a small town, on a road that ends near a creek. My husband and I have bought two lots on this road, and we would buy a third if the price weren't so high and we weren't worried about what the economy will be like under the next president. These days, I want space between me and the next person; perhaps I'm becoming a misanthrope. Someone who saw photos of our house told me our house and property looked like a "retreat," and it is. It's a retreat for me--a retreat from a life where I had spent my working hours (not just in the office and in the classroom)  trying to help other people write better, think better, and understand the world better through reading, writing, and thinking; a retreat from a world where we are considered "consumers" rather than "citizens"; a retreat from those paved parking lots and all the stuff we're encouraged to buy to "keep our economy growing."

I like it here, especially in the fall and winter, when the air is cooler and drier, and especially here at my retreat, where I am alone most days, but not lonely.

I know that I should get a job; I'm only fifty-four (nearly), but I have yet to decide what I want to be in my old age. I know that I don't want to teach. I don't have the patience for it anymore. At one of the last universities where I taught, a student wrote on her evaluation of my teaching that she hated that I made her read about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 or about the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Sudan. As part of a research project, my students read an essay by Philip Gourevitch about the genocide, the public documents of a government review at the 10th anniversary of the horror, and contemporary news articles about the genocide in Darfur. This was at a Baptist University, where one would think the student population would have a deep concern about injustice in the world, but my student did not want to know and said so. Just a couple of years before, when I was teaching at a university in Georgia, my students viewed a collection of online photographs taken of people north and south of the Mexican/US border and then wrote about what they saw. One student told me that one difference between the people south of the border and north of the border was skin color. "Americans are white," she said.

No, I had more patience then, though it was wearing thin.

Here I watch the hawks, pet my cats, weed my gardens, and hope...hope that the economy doesn't tank any worse than it has already, that the person who gains the White House in 2012 won't lay off thousands of federal employees or dismantle the EPA or  de-fund education (I really don't want to be surrounded by more people such as the two students I've described above) or take away support from PBS (one of the few sources of real--and entertaining-- information these days, and much of it online) or abolish Net Neutrality. I guess that means I hope that a Republican doesn't win.

And I work at figuring out what comes next, in the afternoon of my life.  Lots to think about. No time to be lonely.