I Didn't Expect to Be Starting Over at 76

Part two of the starting-over story: what it looks like when your people are gone

The cicadas start before the light does. I'm up at dawn anyway — old habit, or maybe just an old body that won't sleep past the birds. Coffee on the front porch, Louisiana already thick with July, the kind of heat that sits on your chest like a hand.

This is where I'm starting over. Not on some highway. Right here, on the porch where I've landed, writing my life down to see if it still makes sense.

My best friends are gone now. All of them. Even Thumper — my little dog, my last co-pilot. The gray camper van sits in the drive, pointed at Texas. I don't have the courage to take it there alone.

So I write instead. For now, that's the road.

I had a picture of seventy-six once. Most of us do, even if we never say it out loud. Mine had people in it. Friends on this porch, coffee going cold while we talked too long. Somebody to call when the sunset over the Ouachita was too good to keep to myself.

One by one, the picture emptied out. Not all at once — that would almost be kinder. A funeral here. A phone that stopped ringing there. Then Thumper, who never asked for anything but the passenger seat and half my sandwich.

Nobody prepares you for outliving your own life. There's no manual for it. You just wake up one morning and the world is quieter than you ever agreed to.

People love to talk about reinvention. Magazine covers full of silver-haired women on beaches, headlines about sixty being the new forty, chapter two, act three, best years ahead. Like starting over is something you shop for.

Nobody on those covers looks like they buried their people first.

Here's what they don't print: sometimes starting over isn't a choice you make. It's what's left when everything else gets taken off the table. You don't reinvent yourself at seventy-six because a life coach told you to find your passion. You do it because the alternative is sitting in the quiet until the quiet wins.

I'm not chasing a new me. I'd have kept the old life, thanks. But the old life didn't ask my permission when it left.

So here's what starting over actually looks like. It's not a montage.

It's dawn on the porch because sleep let go of me early again. It's a slow morning that I've learned to stop apologizing for — coffee, the birds, the pages from yesterday spread on the table, deciding if any of it is true enough to keep.

The mornings I can do. It's the afternoons that come for me. Two o'clock, three o'clock, July pressing down like a wet wool blanket, the house so still I can hear the ceiling fan think. That's the hour I used to walk Thumper, back when the heat broke just enough. Now I just sit through it. Push the pen. Some days the pushing is all the work there is.

But I'm learning that a day you push through still counts as a day you lived.

The solar lights come on by themselves at dusk. Small mercies — something in this yard still knows what to do without being told.

I sit in their glow and listen. The cicadas again, louder now, singing like the heat never touched them. They spend seventeen years in the dark before they climb out and make all that noise. Nobody tells them it's too late to start.

The van is still in the drive. Texas is still out there. One of these mornings, maybe there'll be a new set of paws on the porch boards, and I'll find out what my courage looks like now.

Until then, I write. The porch holds me. The cicadas sing.

That's not the life I planned. But it's a life. I'm still in it.

Thanks for reading,

Kindly—Carol