Why reach paradise before it’s due
16 March 2008 
After about 5 hours in an airplane I feel that I’ve been very restrained in only just now finishing my first gin and tonic. Honestly, flying can be so terribly tedious. Which is why I’m about to change my topic.
I’ve spent the past four days on the beach in Naples, Florida. Sounds glorious doesn’t it? Yet the best time I had was at dinner with a couple in their 70s. As my sister says, in Naples, the old people have been let out of their cage.
We were the only bikini-donning creatures on the beach. Not that anyone would have been looking. Troves of people walked along the shore, but almost all of them were at least 55 years old.
I began to think about the retirement habit of moving to warmer water, and I couldn’t decide ─ when I am old and grey and join a Red Hat society, will I move to Florida?
“Why wouldn’t you want to move to Florida when you’re old?” My boyfriend asked in disbelief when I vowed not to be among those who flew South for the winter. “You don’t have to put up with cold weather, and being surrounded by old people won’t be such a bad thing if you’re old also.”
It seems pleasant but slightly unrealistic, as if at that point people have had enough of reality, the harsh ways of the world and the wisdom those ways have helped them to attain. Taking walks on the beach, playing golf and shopping take away the otherwise depressing situation of growing old as your neighbors become younger and your children become parents and grandparents.
But people who flock to Florida for retirement are analogous in my mind to the popular kids in high school who flocked to college parties. Instead of getting ahead of myself and reaching paradise before I’m due, I’d rather relax in my home, visit my family and enjoy the right now and not what could be better. Call me crazy, but I’m just ideological.
A place called home
7 March 2008 
I’m sitting on the couch, drinking wine, socializing and catching up as visitors do — in my parents’ house.
At some point in time, that’s what I began calling my home.
The house has known for awhile. My room has smelled of floral air freshener for the last three years and has accumulated various odds and ends — a sewing machine, my sister’s Irish dance costume, a cello bow.
Freshman year, I drove back for meals and a cozy sense of home, tired of pseudo-homemade dinners and crowded dorm quarters. Then I brought back laundry and looked forward to family time and my own bed. Now I come home on holidays, borrowing clothes when I forget to pack pajamas and sweatshirts.
My mom still tells me, “Can’t you stand up straighter? You’re slouching,” and asks with concern, “Are you sure you can drive in the snow?” but it’s more like the advice of a loving aunt — something I have to hear but not necessarily heed.
My new home is the place I return to after long days at work, where I have piles of dishes waiting for me and a purring cat on my lap when I read. A year from now I’ll have a different new home; I don’t know where it will be, but I know I’ll have to make my own.
And though I won’t be going home to caring, questioning parents or an ever-loving cat, a home is more than a building or even a particular person. All I need is a place I feel comfortable in, a place to call my own.
