It will be provocative, mysterious and ever so slightly crazy. — Actually, I hope it will entertain, inform and perhaps inspire anyone who wonders if they’re too old to start a new life chapter. But a little background about why I’ve decided to launch (is that pretentious?) Old Age Is A Foreign Country . . . And So Is France. When…

I was approaching seventy (gingerly, feet dragging, denying, denying) when I decided to move from California where I’d been living to a French village. Alone. I knew no one in France and barely spoke the language. My decision caused a few raised eyebrows. Won’t you be lonely? Homesick? Miss your…

Montpellier, France. If age is a state of mind, the state of mine that morning was exultant. I’d recently turned 70 and been asked out by a man who guessed we were about the same age. He was fifty-five. The glow lingered as I ran to catch the tram to…

I chose the latter and moved to France. Deciding what to bring with me was surprisingly difficult — My mother had died that November, four months after her 100th birthday. By January, still feeling the emotional aftermath, I was at one of those crossroads where life could spin off in any direction. I wanted mine to spin off towards France, something I’d been thinking about for years, but…

We couldn’t decide, maybe we were both a bit of both — We parted ways a few years ago — I met someone and our lives went in different directions. Still, it was fun while it lasted. We traveled, took a few road trips, booked a weekend retreat to a Buddhist temple in the mountains, and had bottles of bubbly stashed in…

Or just wander through the treasury of my mind — When I announced my intention — to everyone in the world, except perhaps Sub-Saharan Africa, no idea how I missed them — to commit to riding a stationary bike every day, I received a lot of advice on how to alleviate the inevitable boredom. Stationary bikes get a bad rap…

Does that sort of thing happen in real life? — Iwrote nine books for Harlequin. Almost all of them had kitchen scenes. Sexy scenes that bore little resemblance to real life. Maybe I wrote them because I enjoy cooking. I used to say I love cooking, but I’m not sure that’s still true. It was when I first moved to…