I suppose it is the people. In a small community, made of of many different folk, not one who is very much like the other, common strands appear. Here I am in a town in which I can define myself as much as by what I am not as by what I am. And in all the subtle differences between people, among taste,and preferences, experiences, likes, and dislikes, the strands hold together.

I have a radio show, in which I get to play any music I like on the air to share with anyone else that might listen. And a song might touch a person for a reason that is different than why I might like a song, yet we both like the song. I play old music from the seventies, and people I will never meet in the real world call me up to tell me how much they like it. They tell me a little of their life, what they were doing when they first heard that song, how old they were. And they tell me about another song they love, another group.

And in the world I share with a few friends here, where we eat together, or simply laugh at each other’s jokes, I can relax in the security of being in a place where I feel safe, comforted, and at ease.

My life in professional worlds I navigated may not have been very successful, and I may have never achieved anything close to what I once held as dear. Yet what keeps me going, even if my days are sometimes filled with the minutiae of not much at all, is a contentment in what I have. If my days consist in watching the hummingbirds feed from the flowers I planted on the balcony, or from going out to dinner on my own, watching television, cooking something, gardening, meeting a friend for tea, then perhaps I do not want much else.

Happiness and unhappiness are always around the corner anyway. There is so much time and space between. So perhaps this is why I live in a town that does not ask much of me at all, a town where I am not very visible or vocal, but subsist quietly, loving it all the more.