As I lay in bed this morning in Florida, trying to sleep again, my wife already up and busy, I began picturing where we are. Sometimes, when we visit here, I sleepily lose track of our location, confuse it with our Wisconsin home, vaguely envision our surroundings both here and there as if I could simultaneously relocate myself in time and space. And so, blankets over shoulders and eyes closed, I visualized rooms around me, mixing them with similar rooms we reside in elsewhere, conjuring images from two locations: this familiar one-floor condo rental separated from a golf course by a narrow stream north of Sarasota, and our two-floor condo home in a complex along the Fox River in Waukesha.
Imagining the rooms presently around me—my bedroom, bathroom and closets, her bedroom, bathroom and closets, the living room and dining area stretched alongside them, the west side kitchen and hallway both ending at front doors leading to a parking lot, the east side screened-in patio where the sun rises directly above trees scattered across a golf course visited early and late by various busy birds—made me aware of where we were now, the country club apartment we've annually rented for five late summer/early autumn weeks over the past six years. Sometimes, because I wake three to five times each night and struggle each time to fall asleep again, I'm drowsily uncertain where I am and woozily attempt to clarify how our present surroundings differ from the ones that we routinely inhabit for forty-seven weeks each year, entirely through winter and spring and some neighboring weeks.
This morning, body snugly wrapped, my waning thoughts conjured northern pictures, not like old memories but like recent sightings. I envisioned images of our home—my bedroom, blinds on east-facing windows on the same side of my bed as in Sarasota, the dresser also across from the foot of the bed and the bathroom closer but in the same direction, her smaller bedroom down the hall a similar distance away, the guest bathroom across from the narrow study that separates bedrooms, the laundry closet on the wall above the staircase circling down to pass a heating and water closet facing a supply closet on a short hallway to a third bathroom, all opposite the garage entrance and leading to a joined kitchen and dining/living room area. Our condo faces east, the sun shining daily through our entrance door and patio windows, our back wall adjoining another, west-facing condo. We've lived here seventeen years. With eyes shut in my southern bed this morning, I conjured images of our northern home, unable to sort out the differences between our Palm Aire and Fox River residences—too groggy to separate them distinctly or keep them from blending.
Eventually, persisting and growing fully awake, I confused them no longer and, unexpectedly, began to recall vaguely related images of the old neighborhood central Michigan house we lived in for almost thirty years while teaching at a local college and neighboring university and then, pushed further back in time, of the similar house in western New York in which I grew up, random resemblances among them both flashing from memory. But memory didn't linger long on those settings; it quickly returned to those simultaneously immediate ones. Again I wandered slowly through images of both of their now separated interiors, carefully distinguishing their similarities and their differences, until I became too aware of deliberately envisioning them. I rolled onto my back, opened my eyes, and acknowledged daylight entering through window blinds. All those household images evaporated.
But, somehow, I couldn't let it all go. I wanted to understand why that confused home-blending occurred. It wouldn't have happened in Wisconsin—it was probably provoked by our temporary relocation here, making a lifestyle comparison more noticeable—and I didn't recall it happening in earlier years—mere repetition couldn't have prompted it inadvertently. We've been visiting our daughter in Florida for roughly a quarter of a century, since she graduated from a northern college and moved south, before her marriage and the birth and growth of three children, before we abandoned cross-country car trips south to visit them and settled on air travel to an annually recurring rental—this year, our oldest grandchild graduated from college and began working towards graduate school, her brother enrolled as a sophomore at a relatively nearby university, their younger sister still living at home with two more years of high school ahead, their parents fully employed, we grandparents no longer occasionally necessary babysitters. Predictable alterations in lifestyle for all of us have become—at least for a grandfather who acknowledges them so slowly—more constantly, more persistently obvious.
Something outside the usual circumstances must have triggered the confused blending that haunts me, perhaps an innate awareness that imminent changes are already in process, sufficiently unavoidable and insistent on being noticed. Memory is making me assess changes I've been unable to overlook entirely but can no longer avoid examining more meticulously. In the past, while I was employed at universities, I couldn't avoid preoccupation with—or entirely take a break from—intense course preparations and imminent deadlines for publications and preparations for presentations requiring immediate attention. By now those kinds of responsibilities no longer make persistent demands on me, though I realize, at last, that I still behave as if they are potentially lurking, as if they need the same spaces in time to accomplish what would be necessary to complete them. I still have a familiar—if undirected—energy; I should more thoughtfully determine where to release it now.