This Way Up: Old Friends, New Love, and a Map for the Road Ahead

Toronto Star columnist Bradbury (The Bright Side) shares an affecting account of taking stock of her life in her later years. After retiring at 68, Bradbury found it hard to imagine her future, so she decided to retrace her steps in search of answers. She visited her childhood home, where “the past and present were pressed together inside its walls”; reconnected via email with a high school sweetheart, with whom she struggled to bridge the gap between “who we were, young, at seventeen, and who we were becoming, old, near seventy”; and returned to her small South Ontario hometown of St. Catherines. That trip brought her the closest to an answer, she writes, explaining that it provided less a blueprint than a reminder that “the world was available to me right here. Not as an idea of a compromise or a choice between staying put or setting out, but as the defining truth of where I was.” Bradbury details in graceful prose the uncanniness of considering one’s life in retrospect, capturing the wisdom and surprise of a liminal state where “past and present” are more like neighbors than distant relatives. Sensitive and self-aware, this is a captivating meditation on what makes a life. (Apr.)