Chapter 10: Walking Straight At It

The Delaware River is mostly mine at that hour. The morning is early enough that the only company is a jogger who passes once and a biker who passes twice. The water sits flat and grey. A few gulls hold their place on the rocks and the old jetties. Cars move along the highway beside me, far enough away that the sound softens into something like weather.

The waterfront is changing around me. Construction has started in places, the early signs of money coming back to this stretch of river. Between the new work sit patches of wild beach and a few docks left to rot in peace. The whole place is somewhere in the middle of becoming something else.

These walks used to be for breathing. They were time to let my mind go loose and quiet and empty before the day asked anything of me. That is not what they are anymore.

Somewhere along the river the dreaming turned into planning. The loose thoughts started landing as actual decisions. Now I walk and I build the next part of my life in my head, one specific piece at a time.

The new home is real to me now, not a someday daydream but a place I am moving toward with intention. A studio waits in the picture too, outside the house for the first time, in a corner of the city I keep coming back to in my head. The trunk shows are coming back, the rooms filling with women who are there because they want to be. Somewhere in there the book gets finished and goes out into the world under my name. And the kind of success I once believed was not meant for someone like me is part of the plan now.

None of it is here yet. The distance between the life I am walking toward and the life I am living right now is wide. Some mornings I feel every inch of it.

Sixty-six is supposed to be the age where a woman makes peace with what she has and settles into it. That was never going to be me. The wanting did not fade and I have stopped waiting for it to. None of this is happening because I have to. The business could be smaller and I would survive. This is happening because I want more and because I have finally decided I am allowed to.

So I keep walking. The gulls hold their place on the rocks and the construction crews start arriving as I walk back home. The river keeps moving toward something and so do I. The life I want is not behind me. It is somewhere up ahead and I am walking straight at it.