FLORIDA vs NEW YORK

After high school graduation, at the age of 17, I left Miami, FL and moved to New York City where I met and shortly after married my husband, Sanford.
We have been gifted with three lovely daughters, Pam, Toni and Colette.
When we retired to Florida after spending 48 years in NYC, I was somewhat surprised that I didn't have to make any adjustments, even though we live in a different Florida city... not the one in which I grew up. Some of my friends who have lived in Florida all of their lives told me that I would miss NYC, the changes of the season and the differences in the way of life, etc.. It didn't happen!! The one thing I miss about living in NYC are the friends that I left behind.
When we had our 50th High School reunion, I was really surprised that I could remember the names, but not the faces of most of my former classmates. I could have passed most of them on the street and not recognized them.

Some things that make living in FL so much better than living in NYC are:
There are no parking problems and expensive parking like there is everywhere in NYC... rarely is that a problem down here. There's always free parking when we go to a doctor's office, or a hospital, to a restaurant, to visit friends, to the bank, shopping, etc.. Businesses, homes and housing complexes all have free parking for visitors. There's no cold weather or snow here. The only time I feel cold is in my church or restaurants where the air conditioning is turned down too low. The heat is not a problem for us because our apartment has central air conditioning... We step outside our air conditioned apartment into our air conditioned car and wherever we go there's air conditioning unless we go to an outside event. There are beautiful green trees every where and most of the year blue skies with fluffy white clouds. We wake up in the morning to the sound of birds in the trees.
There was a hurricane here in Ft Lauderdale in 2005. It was the first one of that magnitude in over 50 years. And it really wasn't so bad, the worse thing that happened to us was that we had no electricity for 8 days... but many areas were without it for weeks. The city provided us seniors with ice, bottled water and emergency type meals. There's very little stress living down here. We don't have a mortgage or car payments. It seems like we have more control over our lives, which we didn't have in NYC. That may well be, because we pretty much do what we want, when we want and if we want.
Am I beginning to sound like the Chamber of Commerce?

We've been back for 13 plus years and yet, there are times while riding in the car that I still get a rush looking at the beautiful blue skies and green trees. At those times I'm reminded how blessed we are to be able to live here at this time in our lives, where our only real concerns are health issues, which we would have regardless of where we live. I often think of the words to that old song... "Summer time when the living is easy".


You never know who's heart you will touch when you share a piece of your own.