Time flies like a kite

The years slip up on you with muffled oars.

According to Einstein, time can run backwards as well as forwards but nobody knows what that might look like.  For most of us, time relents only in memories, not in the mirror.  You can measure it in years or in milestones, in children raised, promises kept or in dreams deferred. It stalks you like a shadow, pulls up a chair at the table next to you like Banquo’s ghost.

My wife and I were jolted into this revelation the year I turned 60 (she’s younger and better looking).  It was a time marked by a series of unfortunate events and a few good ones, too.  If it had a soundtrack it would be a cross between something by the later, apocalyptic Warren Zevon and Ashokan Farewell.  Kids were getting older and moving out, life circumstances were evolving, as they say.  Twenty-seven years in the same house in the same town on the same street and then, suddenly ….

To paraphrase: you may not be interested in change, but change is interested in you. So we took a pilgrimage to that most unlikely of holy places, my home town, Durham, North Carolina.  We hooked up with our sometime real estate agent, a cigar smoking, pick-up truck driving resident of nearby Chapel Hill (and really cute, says my wife).  And we walked in on 10 acres of beautiful, rolling pastureland and woods just outside of town that had just come on the market.

“Let’s buy it,” Nora said as we surveyed the meadow and the big old pecan tree standing sentinel half way down the gently sloping hill. So we did.

That was July 2015. We closed four months later.  On January 1, 2016 we started this blog to record our journey.  Of course North Carolina is the “you can’t go home again” state, thanks to native son Thomas Wolfe, so I guess we’ll see.  But this isn’t really about moving, the peculiarities of perc testing, Einstein’s struggle with spooky action at a distance, or even coming home.

It’s about time.

Note about the photo: actual children.