Wrote This Sitting on Our Hill Two Years Before We Moved Here

This place is nothing but seasonal shifting. We've been here 10 years and it is all about the weather. Today is early April, with birds wildly cheerful, but there is a weirdness about the incipient green tipping the hills within my view.  It should be slightly less apparent and more in keeping with the still-grayish light.  

Looking for closure, whether New York or here, I am kidding myself that I have much future at al. My 69th birthday next week, only a few years of words left. Am I really so unhappy that I never became a writer? When I was a kid upstate, the first book I ever read had vivid colored pictures and a font that still knocks at my memory with joy.  The pride in my first terrible weird poem drove me to add "not copied or traced" to the end of every work of youthful authorship.  I didn't want to be an author, then. I was an author, confident in my baby books, my stick figure words, self-adoring every sentence.  

After I grew up and understood that no one had any interest in copying or tracing my work, this early foray into the importance of copyright still served me in my work in publishing other authors. However, I did not become an author myself.  I only wanted to be one.  My novels were a series of unfinished plots and cloudy characters. I could only write self-indulgent entries in my journal -- pretty much the blogs I'm writing now. 

I should wrestle this writing thing to earth here and now. The fantasy of this elusive authorship has dogged me all my life, including, for the past decade up and down the Taconic Parkway, between working in New York and replaying the kid in Hudson.  The decision to quit my job and finally give writing some effort near the place where it all began rests on this hill looking across at the Catskills. 

If Michael and I leave New York permanently, it will disrupt the lives of our sons Jeremy and Willie and my own life in the center of the noise, clutter, and chaos that have kept me energized and driven for nearly 60 years. I will need to quit a job I have been paid nicely to do, and, with its occasional moments of actual writing, has kept the itch for actual authorship at bay.  I will be returning to a place uncomfortably close to the suffocating conservative town that I gleefully escaped years ago, with never any regrets.  And, if, in the end, if we move here and I can't write because I have no stories, will it mean that my life has finished in defeat   Will this hill with its view of the Catskills and the Berkshires be enough to compensate for the loss of the city that I've loved nearly all my life?  

(As if on cue, Robin has suddenly perched at the very top of the pine tree in front of me and its precise orange is a sudden exultation in space.  A tiny perky surprise out of the almost unendurably slow fuzzy expansion of spring. And I could swear that birds around me are now calling to each other "right, right"  pause  "here ".)