Living a Quiet Life

In 2010 Steve and I began this series of visits to European cities. The medical adventures I'd had in 2008 had proven more debilitating than expected, and I was still building up my strength and endurance, but it was taking much longer than the doctor had assured me it would take, and it was very limiting of my activities.

We had been on the verge of resigning ourselves to living a quiet life in both Jackson Hole and the apartment we still had in suburban New York, where if I felt up to it we'd see what theatre tickets we could get for that evening, or what friends were free to have dinner with us. But it dawned on us that the quiet life we were then feeling compelled to live need not be confined to our two home bases. We could live a quiet life in someplace that offered us some more interesting features, like Paris or Rome or London.

What did I hope to achieve with an overseas sojourn of a month or more? Well, I'd always regretted, a little, that our overseas experiences that Steve's work had involved had taken us just to English-speaking places, as I'd always enjoyed learning languages and would have liked to attain a level I could consider fluent. What languages might we hope to learn now? It would have to be either French, in which I had a strong grounding, or Italian, in which my grounding was not very strong, but I had made some efforts to take some classes not long before, to learn some Italian while in Rome and Milan with Steve on deals. We considered the food -- both cuisines got high marks. Same thing for the art and culture of Paris and Florence, which the choice had by then been narrowed to -- the museums and other cultural offerings did not give not an obvious edge to either.

Steve evaluated the geography of the cities under consideration: if I was still not really an invalid, but not a robustly healthy person, if I was going to need afternoon naps, where could Steve go for vigorous walks, semi-hikes -- daily aerobic exercise, without having to travel far? On this criterion, Florence was the winner, as the hills around the city, particularly to the south, have good walks up to places with great views, and on the way up one may pass small farms that still exist inside the city walls and are fun to see, over their walls. Paris, on the other hand, is largely flat--a place for charming strolls and promenades, but not the elevation-gain that Steve's long muscles craved. While he was out getting sweaty, if I didn't need a nap I could be quite content doing my Italian homework, and reading, and developing my inchoate blog.

The years went by. Twice a year we would come to Italy, spring and fall. We studied in Milan and Rome and visited other parts of Italy without studying formally. After a few years we substituted Paris or London for one of the shoulder seasons of each year, leaving just one trip a year to Italy. Meanwhile my health and strength were returning to normal and I could do other kinds of trips in the U.S., and I had increased energy for my creative work, so we had less time for prolonged stays in European apartments and the length of our trips shrank to around three weeks rather than six or eight.

But meanwhile we were also getting older, and I spent some time without success trying to design a graph of my energy level as related to the length of our stays and the increased activity in other areas of our life. This graph would have demonstrated that even with shorter visits, such as this current one for three weeks, we are less busy all the time and we have more down-time reading and writing and relaxing in our apartment -- especially when we're confronted with such a rainy period as was the case this fall in Florence. We're back to living a quiet life.