The cicadas are singing outside, and my old rustic rocking chair creaks every time I lean back.
Nobody needs me to run an errand. The phone isn’t ringing. There are no voices competing with one another and no place I have to be.
It’s just me and myself.
And most days, I treasure that.
I need time alone. I need a place where the outside world can’t reach me quite so easily. A place where I can sit still long enough to hear what’s going on inside my own soul.
That quiet is necessary for me.
But I’m not going to lie about it.
Sometimes the quiet after retirement gets so lonesome I want to cry.
Nobody warns you about that part.
People talk about retirement like you’ve finally won some grand prize. No alarm clock. No boss. No schedule. No one telling you what to do or when to do it.
Freedom.
And it is freedom.
But freedom has a sound to it. Sometimes it sounds like cicadas and a creaky rocking chair. Other times, it sounds like a house where nobody is coming through the door.
I miss a few of my favorite coworkers. We worked well together as a team. We knew what needed to be done, and we could depend on one another to do it.
I miss that feeling more than I expected.
Sometimes I wonder how they’re getting along without me.
That may sound a little prideful, but it’s the truth. I wonder whether they miss the things I did. Whether there are moments when somebody says, “Carol always handled that,” or whether the space I left behind closed up so quickly that nobody noticed it was there.
That’s an uncomfortable thing to admit.
You spend years being needed, and then one day the world keeps moving without asking for your help.
Your job didn’t just give you a paycheck. It gave you people who expected you to show up. It gave you a reason to get dressed, leave the house, and be somewhere at a certain time.
Retirement gives you back those hours.
Then it leaves you to decide what to do with them.
Some days, I’m grateful nobody needs anything from me. I can sit in my chair and listen to the cicadas for as long as I want. I can think my own thoughts without somebody interrupting them.
No questions asked.
No errands to run.
No noise.
There’s a peace in being alone, especially when I have my fur babies beside me. I feel calm. I feel safe from the outside world. I don’t have to explain myself or perform for anybody.
But there’s a difference between choosing solitude and feeling forgotten.
I’m still learning how to live somewhere between the two.
I don’t want to fill every quiet hour just because loneliness makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want to run from myself. This alone time has helped me hear parts of myself that were drowned out for years.
Still, I need people.
I need conversation. I need laughter. I need to know that my life touches somebody else’s life once in a while.
Maybe that’s the truth about freedom nobody tells us: it doesn’t remove loneliness. It just gives us enough silence to finally hear it.
So I’ll keep my quiet porch, my creaky chair, and the cicadas singing in the trees.
But I won’t pretend I never wish another chair was rocking beside mine.
Thanks for reading!
Kindly—Carol