Finding Peace
By Goldie Luckey
The plane is going to leave on time! Maxine can’t leave this over populated,
commercialized city fast enough. Exiting
the office for the last time on Friday was such a welcome relief, no more technical
or fundamental analysis, no more worrying about profit realized or economic
indicators, she’s officially retired.
Maxine sits back and thinks about her
little blue house overlooking the Atlantic and
visualizes long days of working in her garden, listening to the sea gulls and
the waves breaking against her beach. Just as she finally
starts to nod off, the fasten your seat belt sign comes on and the pilot makes
his landing announcement ending with “...welcome to St. John’s
She grabs her luggage from the carousel
and heads outside to her pick up her rental car. Before merging onto the Trans Canada she
thinks only one hundred miles to paradise. She only stops once for lunch as the
anticipation of starting her new life is more important than the passing
vistas. Tomorrow the movers will arrive
with her prized possessions, treasures that she has gathered over her lifetime
and favorite furniture items picked from the hoard of decadent items acquired over three decades spent in
Toronto. A new found friend has left
some staple provisions for her, enough to last until she can go grocery
shopping, and the previous owner has left a fairly decent barb-e-que. Fish
grilled on it and a good night sleep are the sum of her wishes right now.
The next morning she awakes to the sound
of gulls and for a moment thinks she is dreaming. The clock directly in her line of vision
tells her that it was almost nine, she’s slept in. Better
get a move on she thinks, the movers
will be here before long.
It
has been a long day, some of the boxes have been unpacked but most still sit in
the middle of the living room, scattered among the pieces of furniture still
unplaced. With a glass of her favorite
wine, Maxine cuddles up on in the down filled cushions of her fuchsia lounging
chair and protected covered deck watching the ocean waves beating against the
rocks. Rain is in the air, there is a
storm brewing somewhere out on the Atlantic . She can see the lightning flashing in the
distance, but still a long way out.
She’s never been afraid of storms, watching them gather momentum has
always given her an adrenalin rush. The
lonely sound of a fog horn audibly warns ships of rocks and shoals whenever fog
cloaks the lighthouse on the cape. The
wind is picking up and it is getting chilly, Maxine wraps her warm windbreaker
around her and waits for the light show.
She left the high financial rat race of
the big city in search of peace and contentment. The irony of the whole thing is, it was
waiting for her right back where she started years ago. Of course at twenty five Maxine knew it all,
small towns were so boring, the people so mundane and she wanted to do much
more with her life. Arriving in the
great metropolis of her dreams she felt like a fish out of water, with self
proclaimed sophisticated people looking at her like she was an
oddity. “I don’t know you, why are you
speaking to me?” was the impression she got.
She turned herself inside out trying to be a big city girl, to no
avail. Now she is sitting there sans makeup,
stilettos and all the trappings she’d worked so hard to acquire and she is
content. She now understands that you
cannot buy inner peace, it is not a place.
Maxine smiles as she realizes that she is finally where she belongs.
The moment she walked in the door of her
little blue house, with the south facing side garden and white picket fence,
she knew that it would be her forever home.
In her garden she will plant the staple foods of her home province,
turnips, carrots, parsnips, cabbage and potatoes. The short growing season
makes growing more delicate vegetables a near impossible challenge. Hollyhocks grow in profusion all around her
cottage and wildflowers of every color of the rainbow cover her acre of land. Her closest neighbor is more than a mile away,
as is the nearest town. Traffic is almost non existent, unless a bewildered
tourist wanders by needing directions to the Trans Canada Highway
Maxine lies back and breathes in the
salt sea air while waiting for her storm to start. The only sounds she hears are the gulls
screaming at each other and the waves lulling her to sleep.
Goldie Luckey,
Author from Round Hill, Nova Scotia
I have always expressed myself through writing and have
been working on a family history for more than ten years. After retiring and moving to Elliot Lake in 2009 I was fortunate to become a member of
the Elliot Lake Writers’ Workshop. My
more experienced writer friends encouraged me to write, which resulted in five
of my stories being published in the workshops’ anthology ‘Penpourri’. Now
living in rural Nova
Scotia Newfoundland
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