Moving to a new city in my 40s was less about making mistakes I could learn from and more about making choices I believed in Right around the time I turned 42, I started thinking about what my life was going to look like when I was 50. Long-term planning skills had previously been absent from my existence, and the fact that these concerns had surfaced was as much a surprise to me as to anyone else. Living day by day had always seemed a valid way to operate. But I wanted things to be easier and sunnier and I wanted to own a house, and I could not have that kind of life in New York.
This was five years ago, when there was another president in the White House, and many of us felt at least a little bit differently about life in America. It did not seem as indulgent as it might now to want to be happy. I felt that I had a right to a better life than the one I had, and for me that meant moving to a new place, in this case to New Orleans, where I had spent several of the past winters. I didn?t think about how I would feel after making a dramatic, permanent change from a city of 8 million to a city of 400,000. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or how to do it or what it would mean for me, a single woman in her 40s, to start over again; I just knew it was time to go.
It?s now been nearly three years since I bought my home in the Ninth Ward. Next summer I will have been living here full-time for two years. The frenzy of starting up my new existence has n...