That Dangerous State of Affairs, Retirement

Retirement–that longed-for Utopian state for which I worked for decades. Lovely, unhurried mornings, peaceful, sunny days of travel, visiting coffee shops. Plenty of time for cleaning a house and keeping it sparkling, baking cookies, taking long walks. And, oh, my goodness, all that accumulated wisdom. Just a whole headful of good advice gleaned from years of arduous experience ready to enlighten the minds of others.

Thing of it is, with all the free time, procrastination whispers  that I can clean later, that it won’t take long to bake those cookies, that the day is actually a little cool for taking walks and long hours stretch before me. And, for some reason, nobody has been eager to dip into my well of wisdom. Boring? Lonely? Frustrating? Well, I suppose it could be but it isn’t. For one thing, there’s my grandchildren. For another, in my old age, I’ve turned to murder and mayhem–strictly on paper, of course. Which brings me to the subject of mysteries, my favorite form of fiction.

With that useful term,”What if?” ringing in our ears, co-author Barbara Burgess and I put our heads together and came up with an innocent-appearing pair, a youngish woman and her mom, older but not old, and plopped them down in a hundred-year old house in a small town in Oklahoma. Innocent enough, right? But what if somehow they got mixed up in an unexplained murder and the murderer thought these two knew the location of a great deal of treasure? What if they had no idea there was anything like gold buried in the surrounding hills but they had no way of convincing the murderer because they didn’t know who he or she was? What if the only way to be safe and not fear for their lives was to find that treasure themselves and turn it over to the police? Hmmm.

Suddenly old age–oops, I mean retirement–didn’t look boring at all. It looked like an entirely new direction and I took it. By the way, all that wisdom gained from years of living that nobody wants goes into the books I write. Not in great big handfuls, you understand, but a teaspoon of wisdom here, a little pinch there, and it is so gratifying! And, all those experiences that didn’t turn out as I wished because somebody else controlled the outcome? That’s in the past! Another gratifying thing about writing is the stories end the way I want them to end. And that is success indeed!