I live within walking distance of everything I need. The store is 440 feet away. The library is 2,289 feet away. Laundry is a quarter mile away. I don’t drive anymore — my doctor’s orders, after some trouble with anxiety behind the wheel, and honestly, I’ve never felt more at home than I do right here in Bristol.
The Flowers Everybody Talks About
For years now, I’ve helped water and tend 28 hanging plants and 12 big potted planters lining the streetlights downtown. It started as a favor to a neighbor whose old injuries made it hard for her to get in and out of the utility cart. It turned into something the whole town noticed.
People started posting pictures on social media. Folks driving through on vacation, in their motorhomes, would stop and ask what my secret was for keeping them so full and healthy all season.
I tell them it’s water. That’s not the whole truth, but I keep the rest to myself. Everybody deserves a secret or two.
What Retirement Actually Looks Like
Whoever invented the idea of retirement being relaxing never met me. I keep myself busy with snow removal for the town, spring and fall cleanup, odd jobs for neighbors, and volunteering wherever there’s a project that needs doing: clearing out a library basement, replanting a public flower bed, rescuing somebody’s yard from years of neglect.
I took a part-time retail job a while back mostly because my doctor told me to stay busy, and here in Bristol there’s no shortage of places that could use the help. That job taught me more about how not to run a business than almost anything else in my life: I watched good food get thrown out by the pound because nobody followed the manufacturer’s cooking instructions, watched customers get tricked into walking inside because of a rigged card reader at the pump, and cleaned up messes that other employees walked straight past. I didn’t stick around forever. But I’m glad I saw it.
The Town’s Small Mysteries
Every small town has its own strange little landmarks nobody quite remembers the story behind. Ours has a large eagle statue that had to be relocated because it was blocking the view of Town Hall, and somehow, moving the eagle didn’t stop people from still not being able to find Town Hall. I must have pointed a hundred strangers in the right direction over the years, standing about ten feet from the building the whole time.
We’ve also got a genuine Army tank tucked behind the American Legion, mostly out of sight from the main road. Nobody’s ever fully explained that one to me either. I’ve stopped asking.
Loneliness, And Staying In Motion
I’ll be honest with you, because there’s no point writing a memoir if you’re not going to be honest: living alone in a small town in your seventies comes with a real weight to it. The house I grew up in is full of memories I’d rather not carry around all day, so I don’t go back much. My doctor tells me the answer is simple: keep moving. So I do. I fix what needs fixing, plant what needs planting, and show up where I’m needed, because staying still is the one thing I genuinely can’t afford to do.
Bristol isn’t a big place. It’s not going to show up on anybody’s map of must-see American towns. But it’s mine, and after everything I’ve lived through to get here, that means something.
This chapter of my life and everything that led me to it is part of my memoir. If small-town life, hard-won peace, and a little bit of stubbornness sound like your kind of story, I hope you’ll give it a read.
