So, the pediatrician tells me that she is shutting down her practice and moving at the end of December.

I say, "Oh, that’s too bad."

She looks almost abashed and says, "I got an offer I couldn’t refuse."

"Where?"

"Orlando…"

Michael said, "Did you ask her to take you with her?"

Well, no – I can resist the heady temptations of Orlando pretty easily. But moving to Florida at the end of December – a sweet transition, to say the least.

When I lived in Florida, I always sort of wondered about the snowbirds and especially the retirees who moved there from Michigan and Ohio and Indiana and New York, leaving their long-time homes, many of which probably actually looked like something interesting, to land in manufactured-housing settlements on great swatches of flat land around Ocala and such. How could they do it?

Well, after my first winter here (which is really not even that bad, compared to places like the Dakotas and Maine and such), I could see it easily – I could see how, after living in this for 65 years or so, spending four or five months of the year freezing your tail off, tracking in frozen, snowy, mud, shoveling snow and scraping windshields – you could very easily pack up, leave it all behind with a hearty good riddance and goodbye to all that.