I am accustomed to a house filled with voices and noise: laughter, instruments being practiced, “What’s for dinner?” being shouted, or the shower running for far too long. I’m used to hearing footsteps overhead, before they recede across the ceiling the way a shooting star appears in the corner of our eye, then disappear just as suddenly, leaving us to wonder if we only imagined it.

Mom earned a high school diploma from Leyden High School, but Dad left school at 14 to get a job to help support his family during the Great Depression. Had it not been for such hard economic times, he would have earned his high school diploma, too.

That’s because our government a century ago felt that education was important enough to guarantee that young people have the right to be educated through high school, funded by taxpayers.

Throughout my career, I was accustomed to a fast-paced and active lifestyle, constantly on the move to meet deadlines and achieve professional goals. However, with retirement comes a significant shift in routine, and I now find myself with more free time on my hands.

The AP Stylebook is a substantial volume for journalists, students, and writers that, to me at least, deserves its own podium, open to the page about nonessential clauses, marked with a rich leather bookmark, a single light trained on its text. Instead, it stands upright on my desk, crammed beside file folders and various notepads. As an improvised bookend, I prop it up with the mug I use to drink my daily cup of tea — it has “No Drama” emblazoned in gold letters on its side.

Move ahead a few millennia, and lo and behold, these two young foodies are now ancient and use a GPS in conjunction with Nancy’s nagging. As fate would have it, they now live in the boonies of Huntley, and Woodstock is their close neighbor.

We take it for granted that whether or not we see it, the sun is above us in the sky each and every day. Clouds may obscure our view, but we know that the sun is there shining bright. This star influences our planet in several key ways. It determines our seasons, influences the climate, drives our weather patterns and assists in controlling the ocean currents. All living plants are dependent upon the sun and could not survive without it.

I know that’s not the kind of confession you expect to hear every day, but there it is:

Today, I lost a ham.

“How does someone lose a ham?” my friend Anne asked when I told her.

As soon as Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s headquarters carrying a sink (the caption to the video read, “Walking into Twitter HQ. Let that sink in,”) it was clear that Musk was more concerned with crafting Dad-jokey quips than he was about making the platform better, or at the very least keeping it clear from hate speech and disinformation.

For me it was a nightmare.

Even the word “dread” sort of sits in the mouth like a lump of wet clay and falls out with a thud.

My mom doesn’t feel up to getting dressed, and my dad often has to miss out on family events as a result. He asks me to convince her to get dressed so they can go out together. It saddens me that they’re missing out on things and we don’t know how much time we have left with them.

Before December is even over, I get excited about hanging out with January. I start making lists well before the turn of the calendar, to be ready when she comes. I plan out all the fun things we’re going to do together: exercise, self-care, healthy eating, budgeting, family time, career goals.