Neither of us feels any real emotional connection to Tallahassee itself anymore. Oh, The Missus still has a handful of friends in town, but she’s pretty unapologetically blunt: once “the kids” left town to live hours away, she was pretty much done with it. I have one friend nearby, whom I know mostly from Facebook; I’ve had lunch with him a couple times, and will do so again next Thursday, but that’s it. All our friends from years ago have been gone (one way or another) for years — decades, even. And although we both liked and were friendly with people we worked with, those “friendships” went more or less by the board in 2020. Since we retired, we hear from “work” pretty much only when something has gone wrong that no one else knows how to fix (haha).
Still, a few elements of Tallahassee will linger in our heads after we leave. I can imagine wanting to reexperience a few of them, if/when we come back to town for favorite doctors’ appointments or whatever — favorite local (non-chain) restaurants, for example. And it’ll be interesting to see what comes of some still-in-the-works construction projects: big hotel/shopping districts, various roadways both improved and flat-out new, parks, and so on.
A couple nights ago, we (with The Stepson) went to one of favorite newer restaurants, Backwoods Crossing. It’s out on the eastern side of town, near the interstate, and when we left, although it was around 9pm and hence after dark, we decided to drive through the neighborhood where our house was. (Well, where it still is, but you know what I mean.) A strange experience… We recognized our old neighbors’ cars and so on; the house itself — we don’t know anything about the current owners — had two cars in the driveway, and absolutely no lights on. (?) Strange, like I said… but probably not the last time we’ll feel that way. For the upcoming trip, The Missus has been busily looking up the street addresses of all the houses she lived in over the past 50-60 years because she wants to drive by them, too. She has no current emotional connection to them, of course; they’re just symbols of emotional connections gone by. I suspect we’ll both come to think of Tallahassee that way.