Big cities are amazing, diverse ... and great for a week-end diversion. NYC in particular is an awesome, almost life-changing experience and if I were triplets, I might want to spend one of my lives there -- with frequent trips into the wonderland of New Orleans. But not as the only place to be -- as reality now stands.

I lived in Seattle for a couple of years decades back. I really didn't enjoy it. All the rain was dreary and annoying. But then I moved there from Phoenix / Tucson and the culture shock after so many years in the desert was just too much. I was glad to leave. Overjoyed to get back to the desert ....

I started out in a small town -- back when Lubbock, Texas was a small town and Texas Tech was still an agricultural college, not the university it is today. 63rd Street was the absolute edge of civilization then -- to give you some idea how tiny and compact it was, comparatively.

I miss the neighborliness that was part of the culture then. People knew each other ... and helped each other. But they also gossiped about each other ... and to some extent everybody was all up in everybody else's business. Now that indoor / online occupations in the evenings have replaced front-porch conversations with people from up and down the block as you'd all enjoy the cool-night breeze ... that culture, too, has changed. When people say you can't go home again, that's part of what they mean.

Today, my husband and I live in a very remote part of New Mexico. Without some effort, you can't even see another house. The quiet is broken only by the occasional hoot of an owl, or the barking yip of a coyote. We wouldn't go back to "town life," let alone city life for anything in the world. The fact that we can now see another house without much trouble has us talking about where we might move next to regain our isolation.

I can -- and have -- gone months without speaking to another human being. (But I gotta have dogs. That's not negotiable.) I lived here alone without even a phone for the first nine years, knowing if I got in bad trouble or hurt, it was me and my wits that would have to get me out again. Today, I marvel at my own bravado doing that. I'd think about it long and hard before doing it today. But that kind of tells you who I am ... and why I live the way I do. And finding someone who feels and wants to live that way, too, was something of a small miracle -- in a life frequently touched by those.