Farewell Florida

On Wednesday, February 8, Lisa and I will drive to the Forest Apartments in Durham, the ones Doris and I selected in January, two miles from Duke Hospital.  On Friday, Feb. 10, I start Orientation at the Center for Living at 11 and the exercise workouts.   We’ve speeded up departure when it became clear that Duke truly wanted me there ASAP.

On Monday, Feb.13, Lisa will meet the thoracic surgeon, that I vilified in my last entry.  On Feb. 16, she’ll meet my assigned pulmonologist.  She’ll wheel me around Duke Clinic and Hospital to other appointments for testing procedures already scheduled through Feb. 22, as Doris did in July, November, and January.  Then she’ll fly back to Orlando, and Doris will arrive.  Stay tuned for schedule.

Saying goodbye this week to folks I’ve known only a short time has been difficult, especially the nurses at Winter Park Hospital Cardio-pulmonary rehab.  Even my massage therapist walked me and my oxygen and bags out to my car and hugged me.  “I’m going to miss you.  I’m not in this for the money.  I really care, and you’re one of my favorite clients.”  I was surprised and touched.   

Dr Marlo and I were near tears when she tucked me into my Jeep in front of the Harmony Wellness Center.  “I’ll keep reading your blog.  Promise you’ll stay in touch.”  I came away glowing with bliss from Marlo’s needles and healing energy flow on Thursday. 

With an extra half hour in my schedule l allowed myself a detour to Azalea Park, my favorite Winter Park nature spot for thirty years.  To my delight the bright fuchsia blossoms were already opening.   I rolled down my windows and pulled out my chicken wrap.  Everything was delicious.

Two white herons chose to entertain me.  One and then the other swooped down from moss-draped cypresses languidly spreading and flapping their giant wings directly in front of my Jeep.  They danced and preened.  Then one after the other spread that incredible whiteness and slowly propelled themselves back up to bounce and sway precariously on tips of branches in front of me.  When they found a good branch, they folded into their sleek profiles as if waiting for J. J. Audubon to paint their portraits.  Good omen for the journey ahead! 

Saying good bye to old friends from thirty years ago is impossible.  I will see them again. Several have stopped by.  On Wednesday, I had lunch with women from my old Pagoda community on Vilano Beach.  Many now live at Alapine, deep in the woods on the northern border of Alabama and Georgia, where Doris and I visited them on our first trip to Florida in Oct 2010 for better breathing at sea level.  How our fiery battles have melted and mellowed us these past thirty years. 

Phone visits with really old friends keep me connected to our past histories.  Two heart-warming conversations stand out.  My best friend Kathleen from third through eighth grade at St Jerome in Chicago called, as she has several times, to reassure me of her prayers and thoughts.  We reminisce about how much more adventurous our childhood and adolescent years were than those of our granddaughters under constant surveillance.  She’s offered to add details to a draft of my memoir in progress in which she’s a leading character about our Nancy Drew escapades and third grade performances.   Kate, a friend from forty years ago in Fayetteville, Arkansas, who visited me for five days in October, spoke of her Buddhist healing circles and the little black cat who’s adopted her.  

While Doris was still here, Rita and Amy from Duluth came by for two days.  Rita the chef brought scallions from her home garden up the north shore for the oven roasted veggies she cooked here with an organic chicken.  The next week Mary Dee and Mary Helen who publish Women in Higher Education came from Madison bearing a big wheel of Wisconsin cheese.  This week also from Duluth Deb and Dianna (just retired from UW-Superior) dropped in with a jug of maple syrup from northern trees and news of old friends. 

For too short an hour Thad and Polly came by on my birthday afternoon.  Polly brought me a jar of her 2012 homemade orange marmalade.  Thad and I mused, as we have on my past whizzing through Florida visits, on the decline of humanistic liberal values, while bolstering our optimism with new causes or just leaning back surveying it all.  Thad was President of Rollins College when I was here.  He came a year before I did and had a hand in hiring me.  He retired a year before I left.  His departure prompted my moving on because I knew that Rollins would never be the same.  I told them, as I’ve told many people, that my happiest years in academia were here, not just because I was young and full of hope in my forties (Lisa’s age), but because Rollins nourished and thrived on true academic openness to new, edgy, eccentric, wild ideas and people—like me . 

Thad’s leadership showed me that a progressive visionary at the top can set the spirit for a whole institution and encouraged me to believe that I could be that sort of leader. I tried to reproduce the Rollins ambience in Missouri and Wisconsin, but it never quite worked because faculty didn’t trust what they’d never seen. They couldn’t believe it wasn’t too good to be true.