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I think there are moments in our lives when somehow we sense big changes are on the horizon. I sensed this but put thoughts of it aside as I boarded a plane on December 6, 2006 to fly to Belgium. My youngest child and only daughter, Sarah, lives there with her Flemish husband and my granddaughter Ayla. I fly there each Christmas season, but this trip was different. Sarah had not only a slipped disk — the lowest one on her spine — but all fluid was gone between it and the disk above it, which was also showing signs of damage as a result. Her pain and inability to move normally needed the skill of an expert surgeon and a relatively new procedure in which a prosthesis disk with a gel-like substance is inserted to replace the damaged disk. My child was to be cut open through her lower abdomen, have her various organs moved aside in order for the prosthesis to be inserted, and would take a few months to recover. As mothers do, I put aside everything to go mother my daughter and run her house, cleaning, cooking, shopping, entertaining visitors, and, of course, caring for Ayla along with caring for Sarah. Hopefully,the operation would prove successful, and my daughter could live a normal life once again.

I was in the middle of writing my book, “Rudolph, Frosty, And Captain Kangaroo,” and I had a deadline with my publisher. The first week upon my arrival was spent in preparation for the operation. I wondered when I would find time to write – certainly not that week. Then, Tom, Ayla, and I took Sarah to the hospital. Children are allowed to visit their parents in Belgian hospitals, young as they might be, and Ayla was seven. I couldn’t believe the ease with which Sarah was admitted. She simply gave her name and was told by a smiling office worker where to go and that we could all go with her: No questions about, “And what insurance do you have?” No forms to fill out. All had been done, and the government would pay so that my daughter would not become a cripple. This was one moment when I was happy that, in spite of the thousands of miles between us, my daughter had moved to Europe. Even with medical coverage, in the U.S. the costs that still lay upon the insured would have put her into debt for life.

The operation took place a couple of days later. We were asked not to remain at the hospital. We would be called when we could see Sarah and, if God forbid, anything required our presence. All went well. The doctor said the surgery was a success, but only time would tell if her body agreed, the prosthesis would be accepted by her immune system, and if no nerves were permanently affected, as sometimes they were, causing pain in the legs permanently.

The second week, we were at the hospital each and every day. Sarah was having all sorts of reactions to anesthesia, which she’d never responded well to as witnessed in an appendectomy and a cesarean section prior to this operation. Finally, the doctor felt she could be sent home. Her right leg ached, and it would be weeks until we knew for sure that no nerve had been damaged. My massage muscles increased in strength as nightly they worked on that leg.

A few weeks had passed and my publisher’s deadline was nearing — February 1st. I was nearly halfway through, but with less than two months to go, could I possibly complete all that remained to be written? I heard Sarah’s voice calling from the room off of the living room where the government paid for a hospital bed while she recovered. It is a quaint room where Tom’s hundreds of CDs sit upon thin wooden shelves, where a television of modest size and a DVD player stand upon a little tea-cart-looking stand, and where their new sofa allowed me to stretch out and relax as Sarah and I stayed up late each night watching the series “Six Feet Under,” to which we had become addicted. It was our nightly mother/daughter-everyone’s asleep-forget pain-become absorbed activity.

Yes, Sarah called to me as I was in the adjoining living room and said, “You better start writing that book, Mom. Here’s what I suggest. Tom will take Ayla to school. When she leaves, you can bring me breakfast, you eat, get dressed and sit down in your room or up in the living room and write. We’ll take a lunch break, and then you write until you have to pick Ayla up.”

I had gotten an international license and once again drove a stick shift car, and being directionally challenged or directionally dyslexic or both, I managed to find my way to Ayla’s school and a few other places around town, scooting in and out of cobblestone, narrow roads and wondering just where to go on these roads as the bus turned onto the street and appeared to be aimed directly at the car’s front end. Amidst this, shopping in Delhaize, their supermarket which I love but must find things in and then figure out the Euros to pay with, and generally becoming a full-time mom after years of an empty nest, I thought of Sarah’s words: “You better start writing that book, Mom.” And so I took my daughter’s advice. She is great at organizing.

About one week after I’d sprawled my papers, father’s collections, hand-written notes, books and laptop plugged into a transformer, Sarah perked up. Her leg still needed daily massages, but she actually showered and shampooed her own hair again, and she said she would now like some visitors. With the table in the dining area of the living room filled with my book paraphernalia, people began to come over. In Belgium, one serves coffee and cake always. I managed to make room on the coffee table for the array of people eager to see Sarah. As her and Tom’s friends have become friends or like family to me, it was very hard not to socialize along with serving the delectable Belgian cakes and, of course, chocolates; delicious because the government regulates the ratio of the amount of sugar to cocoa, and the latter wins out. Hence, nothing is sickeningly sweet, and Belgians, for all the goodies they eat, are not fat.

It took time, but I finally said my hellos and explained that I had to get back to writing. Growing up in a household bustling with conversation and activities, I’d learned how to concentrate with noise and commotion around me, so I sat at the table and wrote while the guests and Sarah chatted, and I’d get up periodically to make another pot of coffee. The dash of cinnamon that I added to the percolator seemed to do the trick, and my coffee was much appreciated.

Ayla came into my room each morning and asked, “How many chapters have you written, Ami?” The “Ami” came from the time she was 14 months old and in my arms in the pool in Miami. The moon could be seen in the daytime sky, and she kept pointing and saying “Mewn, Mewn,” and I sang her the song “Moon Over Miami.” Her response was to say, “Ami’s Mewn. My Ami has Mewn.” So Ami I am, and each morning my granddaughter asked which chapter I would write today or how many days would it take me to finish a chapter. When I picked her up at school, she would ask before anything else, “Did you finish that chapter, Ami?” If I didn’t, I would be told that I had better finish it the next day. Tom, too, would check up on me, and I was touched and grateful for his insistence upon washing the dishes many a night, or doing the shopping if I gave him a list. He is a journalist, and he respects the art of writing. Between the three of them, I began to believe I would make the publisher’s deadline. I remember crying out to Sarah when I’d edited and re-edited the last chapter several times and now, called the book finished. By then she was mobile, even going out of the house once again. She came over and hugged me, and I cried like a baby. I had ten days left before returning to Miami and sending off the manuscript, and I intended to put all signs of the writing gear away and have a little holiday.

Remember, in the beginning of this tale, I said that there are times in life when we sense big changes are about to happen. While in Belgium, I felt a bit like Moses: like I’d gone up to the top of the mountain, and a message was coming through from somewhere loud and clear. The message was that when I returned, I was going to have to look seriously at how I could manage to remain the owner of a lovely townhouse in a beautifully kept Association in Miami, Florida.

The Home Equity loan I had taken out initially to supplement performance income so I could write my book had been to the tune of $20,000 at 2.3% interest. Prior to my leaving for Belgium, the interest had soared to 9.5%. I knew I needed more cash to pay the bills, and I knew that nearly $10,000 of my annual income had abruptly ended when the Florida state government, under Jeb Bush, cut funding drastically to the Arts. The Humanities Council and the State Touring Roster, sources of decent pay for me, were now at half-mast, and the Humanities Council soon became no-mast as the Speakers Bureau ended. So, before leaving for Belgium, I luckily found a partial mortgage at 6.3% interest, leaving me with $811 per month to pay. I knew, upon my mountaintop in Belgium, that the only way I might even be able to keep my house was if there were no payments upon it but maintenance, or if I took Social Security to pay the monthly mortgage. That would work, but I’d have to work full-time for the rest of my life unless my book became a best seller: not likely. Callings are callings. What they bring is satisfaction, “following your bliss,” to quote Joseph Campbell.

I enjoyed my ten day holiday with a growing sense of anxiety at the thought of leaving the haven of the loving home of my daughter, the charming country of Belgium, the ivory tower of writing each day, and returning to stare reality right in the face. The morning after I’d come home having experienced a six hour plane delay in New York, the phone rang at 9:03 AM. It was State Farm Insurance with whom I’d done business for 25 years. I had paid over $1,000 prior to leaving the country, paid three months worth of insurance ahead of time. Yet, I was told that, “If you don’t come in today and give us $850, we will cancel your insurance. You can’t have a mortgage without insurance, so the bank will take over your house, and you will be out on the street!” Welcome home!

Katrina and Wilma, those witches of hurricanes, had caused the rates to triple while I was away and I owed up what I didn’t even know was coming before I had left. My monthly payment would now be $547 per month for homeowners insurance. A storyteller and author whose funding has dried up to the tune of $10,000 per year and who didn’t earn even $40,000 when it was a bit more moist, can’t survive paying $547 per month for homeowner’s insurance, then $95 per month for auto insurance on a six-year old car. Hello reality! I already had no medical coverage. But back to homeowner’s insurance.

I had a $500 deductible. In order to bring the monthly rate down a bit — to $426 per month, I had to raise the deductible to $5,000. No sooner had I done this than my roof sprung leaks in four places for under $5,000. My roofer, a kind, trustworthy man who had put an entirely new roof on after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, informed me that he gave my roof maybe two, at most three years until it would need total replacement. I walked out on the wooden terrace off the kitchen, and the boards were rotting. My foot fell through one of them, and another nearly hit a friend in the head when she stepped on one end of it, sort of like a seesaw flying upward while only one person sits on one end.

How would I ever do justice to my beautiful townhouse? I paid the roofer with the money from the mortgage, paid the insurance company the $850 with the same, and saw that time was running out. I loved my home, but what good is it to sit in beauty that is fading with no hope of financing the plastic surgery needed to perk up the facade? My beautiful townhouse was feeling like the weight of the world upon my shoulders. Gas prices were rising, and I wasn’t driving anywhere I didn’t have to — performances yes, pleasure no.

I saw the writing on the wall. I knew big changes were in order, but what, where, how?

The answers came in a strange way, as answers to life’s big changes most often do. Tune in for the next episode.

That’s right. I haven’t been moving on this blog for months. But I have sure been moving. Most folks look forward to retiring somewhere around age 65, and that retirement often means from a cold climate to the warmth and adult communities of sunny Florida. Well, I have looked to my years heading on towards 70 with a totally different slant.

After 26 years in the sunshine state, I have moved to Michigan, and I did so in the dead of what Michiganders have called “the most brutal winter they’ve seen in at least ten years.” I can’t believe I made it through to the sun shining through my window today as spring attempts in mid-April to push its lovely head through the cold. I made it through scraping ice off of my van’s windows to get to the bank, grocery store or wherever else I have had to go. I even made it home one night though I hadn’t driven in snow for over 30 years, not since my children were small and we lived first in New York City and then in Nyack on the Hudson.

I was, some 40 miles away from Jackson, my home, enjoying the town of Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan. A storm blew up, and did it ever blow. My usually tan and now whitening cheeks grew cherry red as the icy snow beat against them as I fought the wind to get back to my car. The traffic was horrid on the one lane in each direction road that would normally take me to I-94 in ten minutes. Instead, I sat, bumper-to-bumper — an experience I hadn’t experienced in any part of Michigan I’d driven in so far. I was used to bumper-to-bumper from Miami where it becomes like another limb upon one’s body. But this night’s bumper-to-bumper was like none I’d ever experienced. My large, made for ice and snow windshield wipers were struggling against the icy flakes falling evermore rapidly upon the front window. As I sat wondering what I would do, namely how I would get back to Jackson, the gauge on the gas tank, which sometimes swings back and forth, went to near empty, and the light came on. Oh, my God! What if I ran out of gas just sitting in this snow growing ever wilder and thicker. I looked left and right. On this one-lane road there was nothing — no restaurant, no gas station, no house to knock on the door and plead for both a phone and a bathroom, as nerves were filling my bladder rapidly.

I knew there was a gas station on top of the hill, but the hill was growing farther and farther into the distance, actually disappearing like a ghost as the visibility grew whiter with clouds of snow filling the air. I prayed my blood pressure would not rise to panic levels and took deep breaths as I tried to remember where the gas tank had read prior to this sudden swing downwards and when I’d last filled the tank and how many long drives I’d taken since then. Not only was the visibility now getting clouded with blowing snow, but the sun was fast setting and night’s darkness casting its net over the snow making white flakes grow at first gray, then blacker by the minute.

Creep a few feet forward … turn the heat down so as not to use up gas … fingers feeling numb … turn the heat up once again just to defrost myself and the windshield that was laden with a growing layer of ice that the wipers couldn’t scrape off … creep, creep, creep … I could feel the car beginning to go up an incline … can it be … I’m starting up the hill, the long hill at the top of which is a gas station … Please, please God or whatever, however, wherever, let me just get to the gas station to fill the tank and empty my own — a bladder about to burst … creep, creep, creep … I can feel the hill getting steeper … creep, creep, creep … I see something that looks vaguely like a gas station in the distance … creep, creep, creep, creep, creep — stop — sit, sit, sit, no motion … creep again … sit, creep, sit, creep … YES! It is the gas station!

Another thirty minutes go by. The tank must be fuller than the light indicated, or else my guardian angel is sitting on my shoulder. At last! The gas station is truly visible and maybe 50 feet away. The road widens here into three big lanes. I can’t see, as my mirror is caked with nature’s precipitation. I open my window to a blast of cold air and snow, look out and my glasses quickly ice. I take them off and my eyelashes are now snowy white as it is snowing into my van, but I can at least see to get into the first left lane, then the second, then the turn lane as people are driving very slowly. I make it into the gas station. Hallelujah! First, I run in to empty my tank. Then I run out to fill up the van. It turns out the meter is totally whacked out. I had at least 6 more gallons. Well, thanks, is all I can say and feel.

Traffic is now at a standstill in each direction of this suddenly huge four-way intersection. I have no idea how I can get out to get back onto the road that will take me to I-94. I contemplate finding a motel for the night, but the prediction repeated on my car radio over and over is that the snow is expected to get worse, leaving perhaps 16 inches by morning, and I don’t relish the thought of living in a motel for two to three nights, and I don’t have my blood pressure medicine with me, and I don’t want to roam around looking for a pharmacy if the weather will be even worse than this. No, I will get onto I-94. The Michiganders have told me that snowplows tend to the roads quickly, that snow melts as all the cars driving home from work serve as a plow of sorts themselves. I can do it. I used to do it. What is 30 years in the scheme of things? It will be like riding a bicycle I tell myself — you never forget, it becomes part of the cellular memory.

How shall I ever get out of this gas station. There isn’t a space to drive out of any side of it. I decide to head for the road perpendicular to the one onto which I have to turn left. Some polite driver who can see through the blowing snow lets me into the right lane. There is no way I can get to the left to make that left turn. I will go straight until I find a place to turn around so I can drive back to make a right turn. I-94, bless you, I know you are not too far away, and my bladder is now empty and my gas tank full. Straight it is I go, and as I come upon it, I see a place demarcated for a U-turn. Slowly I enter it and sit, sit, sit, sit until some slow drivers are at enough of a distance for me to make my way into the crowded street with more bumper-to-bumper cars. I am lucky to wind my way to the most far right lane. It is one of the few times, perhaps the only one, that I am thrilled to be on the far right. I make it there just in time to make that longed-for right turn back onto the road that will take me to I-94. I can barely see, and the road that leads to the highway looks like it leads into a big motel whose name is covered with snow. I follow a pickup truck that made the turn onto this road that has a sign, “I-94 West.” I figure if it leads me into the motel, maybe I should take that as writing on the wall, a message to stay where a wrong turn has taken me. But no, the turn leads me onto a snow-covered I-94 where my fear of the tales of skidding on black ice overwhelm me. Again I breathe deeply telling my blood pressure not to hit the jackpot. I stay in the right lane at first in order to be an old-fart slow driver, the opposite of my usual heavy-foot on gas pedal driving learned for survival in Miami. However, the right lane has more ice and snow than the left lane which has defined car tracks, so I switch and put a half-heavy foot on the gas pedal to keep up with the also half-heavy feet on the gas pedals of the cars in front of me. Soon, the road widens to three lanes. An 18-wheeler is in the middle lane and I get into this lane to and follow this huge truck as it is going slow, flattening the snow as it drives. I stay behind it at a car’s length and trust that the truck driver knows what he is doing. Again, after a few miles, the road becomes two lanes. The truck moves into the right one, and I follow. I have a friend now, a guide, a snow plow of sorts, and my highly tense muscles relax just a smidgen. Then, the truck leaves I-94 at Exit 148. I have nine more exits to go without my friend. I stay at the speed the truck was going, but now change lanes according to how much snow I see in each lane at given points. It seems an eternity, but finally, I see the sign for Exit 139 and Cooper Street. I reach it, wind my way off of it, sigh with intense relief, turn left and am thrilled for the first time that the speed limit on this little road leading into downtown Jackson has a speed limit of 25mph.

Five minute later, I pull into the parking lot of Armory Arts Village to enter the renovated historic Jackson Prison that is now my home.  Coming Home to Prison has never felt so good. Prison, you ask? That’s another story.

Tune in for more. I’m settled in now, a Michigander myself, so Blog, I have returned to you.