Opening Up / To every season turn, turn, turn

I am trying. Trying to turn gracefully into the knowledge, the intuition, actually, that this may be my last summer in Cornwall, England.

It was easier to think this way when I first got here. I was exhausted from the traveling; it was rainy, cold and damp in the cottage and I made fires at the end of the day in my wood- burning stove in the sitting room. But this second week the sun has been shining all week, the water sparkling, boats sailing and all the windows of my cottage above the harbor have been open, allowing the gentle breeze to flow through. Under these conditions my thoughts of leaving St. Mawes become gritty and difficult to sustain.

I have spent 24 summers here: 24 summers of good friends, of weddings and funerals, sailing picnics, concerts, outdoor plays and parties and lovely walks through the hills. How to walk away from this segment of my life, my much-loved English life, and move on toward another plan for myself? Staggering to contemplate.

I am so deeply familiar with this place, with both its difficulties and its joys. Yesterday I took the ferry to Falmouth -- about a 20-minute trip across the Bay. I reached into the small pocketbook I keep here and found in the usual slot, my book of tickets for the ferry. There they were, good as gold. Falmouth ferry tickets do not expire.

Three gray seals were snoozing in the sun on the visible rocks as we passed the marker in the Bay known as Black Rock. I wonder if they are the same seals growing older and older or progeny of the seals I have seen year after year? It was good to see them.

Disembarking up the steep granite steps and onto the dock at Falmouth, I felt so completely at home I was smiling. The same scruffy-looking, pony tailed, too-thin young man (though probably not so young now) was playing his guitar on the quay, the case open in front of him to receive public offerings. So many times over the years I have sat on the wooden bench waiting for the ferry to return home while listening to his skillful playing. I drop a pound into the felt-lined case and he looks up with a smile of recognition.

Deeply familiar here, yes, and yet something inside me is calling me to make a change.

How many of you have felt the same, found yourself in a challenging transition? How many of you have moved house, changed jobs, divorced, shifted your entire life or a large segment of it on the basis of an inner knowing that the time has come?

Of course there are practical details conspiring to push me toward another kind of summer. For starters, this year Continental Airlines canceled the overnight flight from Newark to Bristol, which for years has brought me within a three-hour drive to the village. This year I had to come to Heathrow. It is a six- hour drive to the village from London, making the trip a two-day journey instead of one. Traveling these days, no matter what, isn't fun.

Life here is idyllic in many ways, but as my daughter points out, "Everything there is harder." And she's right. It's more difficult to find people to fix the simplest things: my doorbell will probably not work all summer, and the latch on the back gate is broken. The heater in the bathroom died. Minor inconveniences, but they do add up.

The grocery store runs fair to poor and demands complete flexibility on the part of the shopper. One arrives with a menu in mind and they have no broccoli or they are out of milk or, there is no cocoa --for the icing of the cake you have just baked. The cocoa will be in sometime next week, and "No," they don't know exactly when.

Though I am grateful that I am physically still able to do so, dragging my provisions in my purple trolley up the very steep Church Hill is getting a bit old -- along with me.

None of the above, however, is the main issue. The extraordinary charm of St. Mawes overrides most of its inconveniences. I do not want to say "goodbye" to the people I love here, "goodbye" to the village life to which I have come to belong. It tears me apart to be thinking, "this is the last time I'll ever . . ." but at the same time I do want to have my summer life closer to home, nearer to my children and grandchildren. The people I love the most are my family and summer is when they have time to spare. Whatever time I have left I want to share it with them. That is the chafe.

There is no question about it; I am in transition.

Cecily Stoddard Stranahan is a retired psychotherapist and an interfaith minister. She can be reached at openingup@optonline.net.