Composing a Further Life

set in their place and do nothing.”
    The next step allowed the Lawsons to move from their mobile home to what I learned to call a park model, the kind of large trailer that can be towed from place to place by a truck but is basically designed to keep long term in a single park attached to utilities, often with add-ons that make it semipermanent. “Someone told us about this couple who had upped and left everything just the way it was in their park model, and she wanted to sell it really cheap. They had moved into a community that provided a skilled nursing facility for the husband, she wasn’t coming back, and the rent was due soon,” Jane told me. “I said, ‘Hank, let’s just peek in the windows and look at it on the way home from coffee.’ Well, it was all my colors, and I loved it. I just fell in love with it and said, ‘Oh, I would love to have this.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll sell our mobile home and get that, if this is where you want to spend the rest of our winters.’ So it was like we had to make a down payment right then and there. And I said, ‘I can’t do this without talking it over with the kids’—mainly our son, who’s the business person, he is part owner of a building supply company. And I said, ‘He’s coming out in a few days, and I want to have him look at it and talk it over with him.’ So we put five hundred dollars down and they gave us a week and our son thought it was a great idea.
    “It was on the site fully furnished with sheets on the bed, towels hanging in the bathroom. Everything you would want except clothes. So we bought that for $28,000, and we came home and put our mobile home up for sale for $28,000 and sold it within a week because it was new.”
    Four years later, after selling a house in Maine, the Lawsons upgraded to a larger park model that was also already on site, where children or grandchildren could be put up in foldout beds for visits, strictly limited by park rules. In this sequence they reflected two of the common ways of looking at space during retirement—they scaled down but made sure their new space would allow family visits. There are photographs of children and grandchildren all through the park model, family and friends gathered there last year to celebrate an anniversary, and Jane and Hank are on the phone with one or another of their four children virtually daily. The latest park model is on a site with an open field behind it, with a view of the sunset, and they expanded it with a sort of enclosed patio called an Arizona room.
    Because of Jane’s seasickness, although they had owned a small boat and taught their four children about boating, the sea was not central to Jane and Hank’s dreams of retirement. Still, there were subtle echoes of sailing wherever I looked. The park model in which they lived was much like the living quarters on a ship—compact and carefully planned spaces that required putting everything back in its place after use. Between their seasons in Arizona and Maine, Hank and Jane started going on annual cruises, but these were always river cruises, where seasickness was not a problem: first the Mississippi, then the Rhine, then a cruise in China. Hank said to me one day, “My friends ask me how I can bear to be away from the sea, but now, just look at those mountains.” The Tucson Range, arid rock with little vegetation. But as we looked, cloud shadows moved across it, the light shifted, and I realized that the living rock, deep founded in the earth, is as dramatically alive as the sea, constantly shifting, something to be gazed at for hours, just as we can gaze, the way our ancestors did, at the flickering flames of a campfire.
    By the time I met Hank, he had learned a wide variety of skills in working with precious metals and semiprecious stones. The first example of his work that I saw was a chain necklace, given to me by Dick and Barbara. Such chains are made link by double or single link from different thicknesses of silver wire, then twisted together like a cable with a variety of textures. The Goldsbys, who are both biology professors, joked that the chain they gave me represented the double helix of DNA.
    Hank showed me a variety of other products he had developed, which he was reshaping into a small business. He got out half a dozen silver mussel shells, produced from a few shells brought from the Maine coast to his Tucson workshop, where he had experimented for over a year until he had a mold to produce