I live alone

"You live all by yourself here?"

I looked at the man, surprised. He was installing the new range hood of my new oven.

"This place is so big!"

My house has about five rooms. One of my jobs is as an editor for a private educational consulting firm, and I have been inside the homes of clients who have rooms almost as big as my entire home. To call my house palatial seemed like a farce. I tried to catch a glimpse of his eyes to see if he was joking as he writhed above my new on-sale $400 oven, but I realized he wasn't.

Of course, I remembered the reaction when the house passed from my mother to myself after her death. My aunt and uncle told me I should rent part of the house, although I had no economic reason to do so. I was confused--did they want me to sleep in the bathroom perhaps. They said, like the man it was 'too big.' For a woman alone, was their implication.

Yet I have always been a woman alone. When I was fifteen, I spent the summer in the Soviet Union as a student ambassador. I was the only person from my school to apply to the program, not because I was the brightest girl in school, but because no one had ever done so before. I went to an undergraduate college, Wesleyan University, to which no Shore Regional High School student had ever applied as well. People preferred to apply and to to where there friends were going. Later on, I lived in England for two years, and afterward people would say to me, shocked--but you didn't KNOW anyone in England, when you went.

Unfortunately, I'm not very daring, although this presentation of myself suggests that I am. Instead, it is that I have a kind of social stupidity. I never look to either side of me, I seem to lack that unconscious social instinct supposedly all women have.

I am also happily single and hate going to the bathroom as part of a potty pack of girls.

This blog is about my life as a woman alone, and the things I do because I am alone. Because I am alone I can run free at night, despite caveats about how women should always be within ten feet of a man to protect her (because men never get attacked of course), of learning to ride horses (poorly) at middle age rather than watch a child learn something I've always wanted to do--for myself, and my musings as a happy single lady who hates to wear jewelery, particularly rings.