this little piggy stayed home
by terri koestler

Lately I’ve been wishing I was wilder in my younger days, more driven to see the world and try it on for size, less afraid to go out at night alone.

I spent my twenties seeking security, safety, and routine—things I did not have as a child. Now, at thirty-seven, the freshness of youth has faded and I’m well on my way towards Handsome Woman status. The softness in my face has taken an edge and I worry too much about the world. Now I’m wondering, should I have been more daring with what I had? Was I ever carefree? That seems a state reserved for the young, a place I can no longer be. I’m flirting with regret.

I think of my sister and how we took our lives in such different directions upon leaving home. I married at eighteen to get a home of my own, which turned out to be a one-bedroom apartment with two cats. I chose a sweet man who was docile to the point of lassitude. I looked forward to retirement so I could read all day. I craved the peace and invisibility of old age, when (I thought) your wrestling match with the world was done. I wore housedresses, made pots of chicken and dumplings or cheese grits or biscuits and gravy. (What is it with Southern comfort food? One might think we were all toothless!)

While I was filling and surrounding myself with the comforts of a peaceful home, my sister was out on the town, wearing black stilettos with metal heels and showcasing her ample stuff in tight, low-cut clothes. She loved to juggle boyfriends and dates. A blinking answering machine meant the difference between a good day and a bad one. She traveled to Panama with one guy—soldiers patrolled the streets with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. She went to France on a shoestring and slept in a train station when she ran out of money. In Paris, they served pizza with a fried egg on top. When we lived in Florida, she went out at night alone—in Miami.

Now that I’m up to my ankles in middle age, I envy her recklessness. I think she had a lot more fun. At the time, I wondered if she’d live to see forty. She has. To be fair, I should also say that all this time she’s been a nurse—a damn good one. So I’m wondering: is life about seeing and doing as much as you can soak up? Or is it about figuring out who you are and being that, wherever that takes you, whether it’s Paris or your own front porch?

Looking back, I realize I have taken risks in my life, just a different kind. When I was twenty-five, I jam-packed a U-Haul and left all else that made up my life at that point, to start over. I pulled that trailer hitched to my little GEO straight through from south Florida to western Kentucky. The simplest way to explain why I did it has to do with the song by U2, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and the way it made me feel back then. Now when I hear it, it no longer strikes an achy chord in my chest.

I also went back to school at twenty-seven. Recently, I turned down a promotion because I knew it wasn’t right for me. I’ve even traveled a good deal—although none of it required a passport or a flak jacket.

As for my penchant for solitude, I wasn’t just driven to it as an antidote to the chaos of abuse and divorce we knew as children. I’d hate to think my life has been one big Pavlovian response. No, I’ve always craved time alone and the inner worlds of books and daydreams. I was a solitary child in a large family. I love them dearly and I wasn’t immune to the charms of our little circus, but I also loved disappearing to the backyard and climbing the huge grapefruit tree, or climbing into the hammock under the orange tree with my book. Akhmatova, Emerson, Rilke, and Kenyon: I delight in their pages, crossing time, place, and even death to speak to me. Fellow bookworms understand this delicious intimacy.

I do enjoy the random and colorful nature of meeting new people, of serving and sharing with my co-workers, making them laugh and hitting on some connection or understanding. But when the workday is done, I rush home to simplicity, to study and contemplation; to the easy affection of my small family and the world we’ve created for ourselves out in the country. Here is where I refill my cup. I’ve come to know for certain that the greatest freedom, the greatest success, is to be who you are, living a life of your own choosing. My sister did that, and I see that I have too. Although the scenery along the way was quite different, we’re both happy with where our choices have brought us.

I’d still like to see Paris someday, but when I look at my boy and wonder if a trip to the City of Light way back when would have detoured me from the road that brought me to these laughing blue eyes, I feel the opposite of regret. Perhaps I was born middle-aged. Perhaps my ideal days would put spectators to sleep. But it feels right, it feels good, it feels like me.

Terri Koestler is a happy homebody along with her husband, David, their son, Kurt, and Bogey, the dog who adopted them. They live in the aptly named town of Fairview.