I used to be nice. Really. In fact at U.C. Santa Cruz when I worked at the college newspaper, my editor voted me nicest person on the staff. My paternal aunt warned me that my niceness was not a virtue and someday I would regret it. [She went on to marry her first cousin so her advice is a bit suspect.] I was a girl scout who, though not cheerful per se, was nice. My father was/is really nice. My first husband was nice.

And then life got to me. I've become jaded, cynical, wary, bored, perceptive. I'm more suspicious, dubious, daring, leery and just downright cranky a lot of the time. What changed me? College, boyfriends, family. Becoming a mother, working in corporate America, survival. Money, things, teachers, illnesses, suicides and the surprising consistency of people to just f*** you over for the sake of it. It'll do things to you. Bad things.

So as I reinvent myself in the Rocky Mountains where air is at a premium and everyone fights for water I have to re-evaluate my niceness to suspicion ratio. I'm going to need new girlfriends. I plan to meet them through: yoga classes, church?, through my new company when I get it up and running and through gardening. Any hobby or passion I pursue I will look for friends along the way who share at least that interest with me. I have two old friends who live hours away from me in Colorado. I have future O.S. friends I haven't met yet but who live here in CO and we will meet. 

Women are supposed to be nice. Mothers are supposed to be extra nice. So it is not without some guilt that I regret my niceness has faded away like  a piece of wallpaper constantly exposed to sunlight. I'm a reader, a writer. Now I'm a homesteader: niceness can get you killed when you're living within a rifle's shot of your nearest crazy neighbor. Survival instincts, my friend. It's all about survival instincts, which apparently I don't have much of as I'm drinking well water that didn't pass inspection. Ah well, let that be a story the local E.R. doctors get to tell.

Perhaps niceness is overrated. I've developed other traits to compensate for my growing lack of that one. I listen well. I'm interested in others. I maintain long friendships. I'll take care of you if you're sick.

But I'll also leave without saying goodbye, like some kid with a bandana-tied stick over his back.  And that's the part that drives the meanies wild: why won't I just stay and take it? 

Cuz I have an overdeveloped sense of self-esteem I picked up somewhere along the way. And ethics. So whatever baby, I've dropped out and am tuning in. I've got a good 20 years still in me and it's not going to be about being nice. It's going to be about things so much bigger than that. I promise.

In the meantime life imitates art [which imitated life.] I'm living like Sally Field in Murphy's Romance, like Jessica Lange in Country, like Sissy Spacek in The River. I'm a hard-headed woman, perhaps they were nicer than me.