An Assessment of Retirement

I have been retired and living in north Georgia for two and a half months. When I left Pinellas County it was 90 degrees and 90 percent humidity. As I write this in the pre-dawn hours, it is 28 degrees and 35 percent humidity. We’ve already had one morning when it was 15 degrees. Certain parts of my anatomy are debating whether to go south for the winter or just grit it out here.

Fall is over. The oaks continue to cling to some of their leaves, but it’s a losing battle. The bare, angular branches of the trees against the sky make the woods look skeletal. There is a sense of impending winter in the air. It is a good time to assess what I’ve learned so far about retirement, country life, and rural Georgia.

I’ve learned that Chapstick is my friend. The low humidity, wind, and cold have turned my lips into beef jerky. I’m told I will adjust to the lower humidity. I hope so. I feel like I’m walking around with big, pouty, shiny lips after I smear on the Chapstick. That’s a great look if you’re Mick Jagger, a kissing gourami, or a chimpanzee, but not so great when you’re standing in the tool department of Ace Hardware, and the local boys are wondering whether you’re wearing lip gloss. Can you say, “Squeal like a pig?”

I’ve learned to tell the temperature without a thermometer. If it’s 40 degrees or colder, my nose starts to run. I wear work gloves much of the time when I am outdoors, and I swipe constantly at my dripping nose with my gloved hands. My nose is now red and chapped. I look like a rummy. I imagine W.C. Fields’ nose looked like mine. With my red nose and big pouty lips, maybe I should get big flapping clown shoes and complete the picture.

We have been using our wood stove to heat the cabin. I’ve learned that if I want to wake up to a warm cabin in the morning, I’m the one who has to get out of bed in the middle of the night to add wood to the stove. Meredith isn’t going to budge from her toasty bed.

I am becoming a maestro of the wood stove. I can nurse a load of wood into eight hours of steady heat. Now if I can only remember that the handle to the stove gets hot enough to brand cattle. I try to be quiet when I stoke the stove in the wee hours of the morning but I frequently forget that the handle is hot and burn my fingers. I bellowed so loud the other night that the neighbor’s dogs started barking, and they’re over a quarter of a mile away. It certainly startled our cat; we had to pry her off the ceiling.

I’ve learned that overalls are functional garments, and I wear mine all the time. They have plenty of pockets, keep the dirt out, and are warm. A lot of men here wear them, especially the old timers, so you don’t feel like a rube.

I do have a suggestion to improve them. They have a button fly. When you really have to pee and your hands are cold, it’s a bitch to unbutton the buttons. If you’ve ever worn a snowsuit you’ll know what I mean. I’d replace the buttons with a giant zipper and attach a strong rip cord to the zipper pull. I’d put a patch next to the fly that said, “Pull only in an emergency.” I know it would look odd having a giant string hanging down over your crotch, but it would be practical and prevent accidents. It may even become a fashion statement. Imagine brightly colored tassels fluttering around down there. I’d call it the ripper zipper look.

There is a drawback to overalls. They trap gas. Wearing them can be dangerous after an evening of Mexican food and a few beers. I was wearing overalls the other day with the legs tucked into my boot tops, and I let one rip. I thought my boots were going to fly off. I think overalls should have emergency blow out vents in the back.

I’ve learned that making cheese is not as easy it looks. Mozzarella is one of the easiest cheeses to make. I’ve tried to make it twice and failed both times. It is humbling to realize that a Sicilian goat herder with a third grade education living in a stone hut can make cheese, and I can’t. It’s the same feeling you get when your kid can turn on the disc player and you can’t. I need to locate someone around here who knows what they are doing cheese-wise and get some hints.

I’ve learned that there is a big difference between the little backyard garden I had in Florida and the big, serious garden I’m planning to have here. The time and effort I’m spending just to get rid of the rocks is way more than I anticipated. The local gardeners tell me that I will never get all the rocks out of this soil. They say that every year more rocks will come to the surface. In a way, that relieved me. I was beginning to believe that the number of rocks in my garden was divine punishment for my sins. I haven’t kept count of my sins over the years, but I did not think there were that many. Maybe working 37 years as a lawyer added to the count. It’s been a long time since I read the Inferno, but I would not be surprised if Dante placed lawyers somewhere in the lowest levels of hell just above politicians, parking meter readers, and daytime television programmers.

I’ve learned that you are more aware of earth’s other creatures when you live in a rural area: hawks and crows, hummingbirds and woodpeckers, deer and raccoons. In my case the list includes infestations of limping daddy long legs, weather predicting wooly caterpillars, zombie squirrels, and swarming ladybugs. I can’t wait to see what’s next−singing dung beetles, belching toads, kamikaze cicadas, farting stink bugs?

More than anything, I’ve learned that retirement is great. I do not miss work one bit. When I said I was retiring, some folks told me that I would miss work and go crazy with nothing to do. Let me get this right. I’m going to miss dealing with cantankerous judges, opposing attorneys who are jerks, Tampa Bay traffic, deadlines, working on weekends, stress, and pressure. Are you nuts?

I know that some people take so much enjoyment in their work that they cannot conceive of doing something else. There are probably long time trial attorneys who still find the practice of law enjoyable. Hell, there are people in India who take great pleasure in driving nails through their nipples and hanging heavy weights from their scrotums. But I suspect that for most of us the profession that we’ve chosen eventually grows wearisome. The exception may be operating a strip club, but I digress.

I don’t think not having anything to do will be a problem. I start every day with a list of things to accomplish, and by the time evening rolls around, I find that I have not made it through the list. Part of the reason for that is because I keep getting sidetracked on spur of the moment whims like making a walking stick or seeing if I can convert an old piece of metal into a Viking axe or learning to sharpen a saw that I will probably never use.

These side ventures are not significant accomplishments or even useful on the grand scale of things. Some would say they are a childish waste of time. But that’s the secret and the joy of retirement: I have the time to indulge childish urges. When people say to me that I will go crazy for things to do in retirement that tells me they have lost the playfulness and imagination they had as a child and forgotten the childish pleasure of doing something just for the hell of it. This may be selfish, but I view retirement as my time of life, a time to indulge childish pleasures, do foolish things, and smell the roses.