In My Words: Kimberly Burton Allen, Writer

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Today is Labor Day…and for the first time in three decades, it’s not even a notable day for us. Living as we have done in places for which tourism is a chief industry, Labor Day always marked the supposed (if not actual) End of The Season and everyone in the hospitality industry drew a collective breath of relief. Tomorrow we called Tumbleweed Tuesday (picture the tumbleweed rolling across the deserted Old West street) and pretty much every restaurant in the Hamptons will be closed for the first time in fourteen weeks. In our business, we found that the bookings did not lessen after Labor Day, but an entirely different type of guest arrived: usually from farther away than the Tri-State area, and way more laid back than the summer crowd. Those of you who’ve (voluntarily!) transitioned into retirement ahead of me, tell me: Do people ask you if you miss your work? I can’t imagine that they do…unless maybe the askers are your old co-workers still in the

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes It has been a little over nine months since we closed on the sale of A Butler’s Manor, and about four months since we took possession of our new house in Connecticut. I have thrown myself into the organizing, painting, furnishing, and decorating of our new (old!) house with manic energy, so that yes, it’s starting to look like I want it to and feel like home. I’m very excited about what I’ve done so far and plan to share it in more detail. But through a combination of factors, I realized that what I most needed to document is how I am learning to navigate my life in retirement. With that in mind, I am reclaiming my neglected blog and committing myself to the sharing of my journey. The hardest part of starting this conversation – and I hope it will be a conversation – is that since I'm stepping into the great blue abyss of The Next Chapter, there are no clear endings for my posts. As a writer who admittedly has concentrated more on blogging over t

Offer accepted. We are in contract. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows us that we found a property that can be a project. Built in 1900, extensively renovated and updated in in the mid-80s, while keeping and enhancing the original details (beautiful woodwork, floors), the house is 2600 square feet on an acre and a half, with 250' feet of waterfront on a large pond fed by a river.  The house is set up with a small apartment which has its own entrance (exterior spiral staircase) which we envisage renovating so that we have both a guest room with bathroom and the apartment. Perhaps, down the line, we'll need the apartment should one of us require live-in care. In the nearer future, perhaps we'll (gasp!) Airbnb it. Under the previous owners it also operated as a garden center, and there are greenhouses, hoop houses, and a raised vegetable bed on the property. And -- be still, Chris's beating heart-- there's a barn with a workshop, an office (origina

I write from a rental cottage in Connecticut that Chris and I took for the month of December. I've k ept the news on the down-low primarily because I don't want to tempt Fate, but we have sold the bed and breakfast, and are retiring from innkeeping. We are scheduled to close at the end of next week --the closing was delayed two weeks, resulting in more hesitation in sharing the news. Once the closing has  taken place and I know it's a done deal, then I would feel more comfor table in announcing it  I studied psychology in college because I was fascinated by how people were wired, how they thought,  what made them do what they did. Specifically, I was obsessed with why I did/thought/felt what I did, and what it meant.  Early on, I took the Myers-Briggs Personality Test (result: ENFT [Extrovert/Intuitive/Feeling/Judging]) and there was a question that has returned to me thousands of times since I first encountered it:  " Do you prefer things settled and decided, or unset

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Dixieland jazz was my childhood soundtrack. First, the LP records (they didn’t call them Long Playing for nothing) on the Hi-Fi stereo console: Jack Teagarden, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, the haunting soprano sax of Sidney Bechet, the seemingly improvisational, but actually well-polished lively sounds of the Firehouse Five + 2, who we could occasionally enjoy live at Disneyland as many of the members of the band were animators, illustrators, and members of Disney studios. There was“Strictly From Dixie,” Benson Curtis’s radio program of trad (traditional) jazz every Saturday at 5 PM, recorded on Dad’s Teac reel-to-reel and played back endlessly over the backyard speakers while we swam in the pool and Dad pruned the palm trees or barbecued the chicken. My parents were charter members of Orange County’s Jazz Inc. jazz club, which hosted a meeting/performance on the second Sunday of each month at a local Moose lodge. From time to time, we kid

Home! The weather has only gotten better the farther East we've traveled. Located as we are on the end of Long Island, we are accustomed to being the last area to experience the seasons. Trees were already budding out in Kansas, Illinois, and Indiana, and winter wheat (?) crops along the interstate were the green of a St. Patrick's Day celebration. I'm glad I packed tee shirts for the final leg back home. It's always interesting to note gasoline prices in the middle of the USA. Yes, prices are always lower than on either coast, especially since California has emission strictures and added taxes in place. But current supply and demand have brought prices down to a level I haven't seen maybe since I learned to drive. A sign off the Pennsylvania Turnpike this morning: Once we hit the middle of the country, road traffic picked up considerably. Most of it was semi-truck traffic, understandably as long-distance truckers are always our lifeline, but especially