My absence from the blogosphere has been due to a series of unforeseen detours demanding my attention but the dust has finally settled and so have we…here in Franklin, Tennessee. For my friends and followers who last read about our relocation to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire area this must come as a surprise so allow me to explain.

Our move to New Castle lasted all of a week, as the landlord reneged on our lease [which he had failed to sign] and as we couldn’t find a suitable alternative on such short notice we were left scrambling for a Plan B. As it turned out, we were providentially able to sell our Volvo convertible to the Volvo dealer and our Vespa scooter to the Vespa dealer, both vehicles of which had issues that we preferred not to deal with, and so we sold them.

Once we had liquidated our vehicles we leased a car, filled it with our stuff and headed to our families in Florida to regroup. On the way we made delightful rest stops at bed and breakfasts in Hershey, Pennsylvania and Staunton, Virginia, where I am originally from. During our trip to Florida, we visited Linda’s parents in the Orlando area and my parents in the Palm Beach area, gathering stuff we left there before our move to New England.

While staying at my folks’ place we briefly toyed with the idea of stashing our stuff there and heading to Europe for the summer but decided instead we needed to get off the road for a while and find a place of our own. We narrowed our prospective destinations to my native Virginia and to the Nashville area of Tennessee, where we both have personal and professional connections and Linda has family.

Tennessee won largely due to its lack of a state income tax and the fact that a return to my roots in Virginia didn’t appeal much to me. We had visited Franklin, a popular suburb of Nashville, a couple of times earlier and it stayed in the backs of our minds as a potential home. We have been here a month and are enjoying getting settled into our furnished circa 1930 executive loft in downtown Franklin within walking distance of Starbucks, the Franklin Theatre, and a host of other cool places. Stay tuned for details!

As I write this, I am sitting at the Atheneum, Nantucket’s public library, listening to my favorite classical music, Antonio Vivaldi’s "Four Seasons." And I am reminded that the metaphor of seasons has served as the soundtrack of my life since we sold our house and stuff last year to move to this remote, romantic island.

I mentioned in an earlier post that my wife and I visited Concord, Massachusetts, the home of Henry David Thoreau, on our way here to Nantucket, and it was there that I jotted down a couple of quotes from Thoreau that captured my seasonal sentiments: “My friends ask what I will do when I get there. Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?” and “While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.”

Upon hearing from our Florida friends of another 80-degree Christmas Day, my wife and I congratulated each other on our migration to the northern climes of New England. I am a native Virginian and so am used to experiencing seasonal weather, especially during the holidays, and while my wife is a native Floridian we used to live in Georgia and Oklahoma, where we had some semblance of seasonality.

Since moving to Nantucket we’ve been regularly reminded by the locals what unseasonably warm weather we’ve enjoyed, which has made for a particularly nice transition for my wife, but we are looking forward to some snow accumulation and not just the flurries we’ve gotten so far. All in all, we are very much enjoying ourselves here, so much so that we are considering moving here longer term. But in the meantime, we are celebrating this season of our lives.