Lauren and I were in Boone, North Carolina on a girl’s weekend. Or a woman’s, or maybe people’s weekend, the complexity of this escape’s definition being, I suppose, part of the problem. All we knew is that we’d both wanted a break from Florida, a place each of us had moved to from Manhattan—she ten years earlier to help out family, me four years ago as part of my husband’s retirement. While we lived on opposite sunshine state coasts, we seemed equally out of water, she in a 55+ Boynton Beach community, me in a Naples gated golf community, two city pals with liberal values challenged, cultural and curiosity yearnings unmet, missing diversity and freedom.

Read the full piece here.