Stages Along the Way

I see from writing this blog that in my memory I divide my life into stages. The first stage, childhood, ended in 1952 when I went off to college and became peripatetic: college, Texas, Connecticut, and North Carolina.

In 1965 we moved to Canada. This third stage, the period when my life was immersed in children, my own and the neighbours’, finished in 1978. In that time also I began to write regularly, four novels.

In 1978 the fourth stage began when my son went off to university, beginning the emptying of the nest, heart-rending but satisfying too. By 1984, the three of them had left, coming back of course for periods, but essentially, gone.

My first published novel came out in 1982. In the next twelve years I had five novels out, taught full time at UNB for a brief period, was on several Canada Council juries, traveled throughout the Atlantic Provinces, to Ottawa and Toronto and Minnesota, was writer in residence at two universities, had two different offices away from home, and began to write arts journalism.

In 1994 the last of the five novels came out, and my husband retired from UNB. My father died in 1997. I seem to have been marking time in this stage, as if I really don’t know where I am going and where I will arrive. Lately, though, I am feeling as if I am close to arriving at the inn of this sixth stage, have rested for many nights, and am about to start out on the seventh stage, perhaps the last. Since March, on this blog, I have been tracing my way from birth, in no particular order, just as memories come to me. I am going to re-read the blog from the beginning and re-read the five novels, to see if I can discern something in this tracing that would give me a hint about the next stage.