On June 30, 2020, the world was in the throes of a pandemic — a virus known as COVID — that would forever alter the lives of millions of people.

And on that same day, I was in the middle of a move that would irreversibly reshape the remainder of my life. That was the day the last of my worldly belongings — what had not already been sold, donated, or trashed — were loaded into a moving truck and a rented van and driven from my apartment in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., to a house I had never seen 578 miles away in the southern state of Georgia.

It was the day I finally admitted to myself that I was getting old.

Did I say “getting”??!!! Hell, I was old. Just three years shy of the age at which both my mother and my older sister had died, I was counting up the encroaching disabilities that seemed to pop up out of nowhere, and counting down the days to my inevitable departure from this earthly realm.

I had been forced into retirement three years sooner than intended. My retirement fund wouldn’t last forever. Most of my friends had predeceased me, so my social life was . . . to put it kindly . . . limited. So when my son suggested that I come to live with him and his family, it felt as though I had been rescued from an uncertain, but certainly unappetizing, fate.

I won’t go into the lurid details of the preparations for the move; suffice it to say, it was horrible. But once the apartment had been emptied, my son (who had driven up from Georgia to fetch me and my stuff) and I spent the night at a nearby Hilton, where there was no food service — actually, no service of any kind — due to COVID restrictions. In fact, there were no other visible signs of life, other than one clerk at the front desk. A nearby grocery store was open, and our dinner consisted of pre-made salads and sandwiches, some of which we carefully conserved for the next morning’s breakfast. And then it was time to hit the road.

The drive down was long — somewhere between eight and nine hours — but smooth, due to COVID’s having induced people to stay home more and travel less. However, the ride from the I-95 exit to the town in which I would actually be living seemed endless. I had no idea we would be so far out in the middle of nowhere.

And hey! Wait a minute! Was that a cotton field??!!!

It was. And it was followed by a lot of Spanish moss hanging from all sorts of oak trees; a small town straight out of “Deliverance,” with a City Hall that looked more like a doll house, and a Dollar Store around every bend in the road; a slew of churches of every known Christian denomination; and more cotton fields and Spanish moss.

Finally — like Brigadoon springing magically from the mists of the Scottish highlands — there appeared a neighborhood of lovely, big houses. And we were home.

As I was welcomed into my new abode by my daughter-in-law, teenaged step-granddaughter, an extremely friendly dog named Dixie, and a cat who . . . well, who still ignores me five years later . . . my first thought was, “Oh well, it will probably only be for about three years, and then I’ll be dead.”

Not that there was actually anything wrong. The house was beautiful, and my family are terrific people. It just wasn’t home, despite their assurances; and I knew it never would be. Because I’m a city girl.

Of course I miss my friends . . . the ones who are left. I miss my daughter being just an hour and a half away, and my cousins a mere ten minutes up the road. But I also miss the things that a lot of people find most annoying about cities.

It’s too quiet here. I lie awake at night, listening for the sounds of traffic — honking horns, squealing brakes, drivers shouting obscenities at one another — that aren’t there.

I miss the fire engines screaming past on their way from the nearby volunteer fire station to someone’s home up the street, and the police cars giving chase to the perpetrator of the latest area crime.

I even miss the noisy neighbors in my big, impersonal apartment building . . . people from every part of the world, speaking in a cacophony of unintelligible languages. And the enticing smell of their dinners wafting through the halls.

I long for the accessibility of everything: the small shopping centers within walking distance, with their supermarkets, pharmacies, banks, book stores, boutiques, and restaurants of every ethnicity . . .

. . . my old, familiar doctors, dentist, optician, hairdresser . . .

. . . the theaters — Kennedy Center, National, Signature, Wolf Trap . . .

. . . huge shopping malls, with the crowds of frantic people racing from store to store, or to the food court, or the multiplex movie theater redolent of popcorn . . .

. . . the many museums of the Smithsonian, the National Art Gallery, the Holocaust Museum, the National Zoo . . .

. . . the beauty of Washington itself, with its eternal reminders of our noble history: the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, the Washington Monument, the U.S. Capitol, the White House . . .

. . . and on and on and on.

I’m already two years past my “sell by” date, and I’m still here. My days are mostly quiet, while everyone else is at work or school. The people I’ve met are lovely folks, gracious and kind; but they’re not my old friends . . . we have no history together. And as a Jewish, Yankee, liberal-leaning Democrat, conversation is limited to the mundane.

Oh . . . did I mention that I hate the climate?

But enough grumbling. Considering the state of much of the world today, I’m doing all right. As long as my words don’t fail me, the internet continues to work, and the wine holds out, I’ll be here . . . communicating in the way I know best, and calculating the number of days by which I have already exceeded the life spans of my mother and sister.

Happy anniversary to me.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
6/30/25