My Spring Fling in NY
Sometimes a Pink Zone is one woman--and I met three.
In May, I went to New York and fell a little in love—three times, actually.
Two of the women I’d never met in the flesh — I knew them the way we know people now, through their writing, across a screen, in that strange intimacy of words without a body in the room. Melinda Blau. Cathy Joseph. Strangers, technically. Except they weren’t, not really.
The third, Anita Campion, I’ve known since 2008, when I lived with her on a spectacular ranch in Santa Barbara, previously owned by Jane Fonda (it has different owners now, but I want her to buy it back and create a Pink Zones retreat center!). Anita has watched me move through some significant chapters of my life — it feels like she’s known versions of me I’d half-forgotten, and maybe even past lives. With her, it wasn’t discovery. It was a return.
I came home from all of it lit up and a little wordless at how to encapsulate it on a page, which is why it’s taken me until now to write this. But here’s what I keep landing on: not one of these women is the most remarkable for how she looks. And not one of them is possible to look away from.
There’s a longer piece I’ve been working on about exactly this — about midlife women and visibility, and how the conversation always seems to assume that to be seen is to be looked at. I think there’s another kind of visibility entirely, one that has nothing to do with being decorative. These three women are what I mean. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
First, I should tell you what this trip was sitting on top of.
I’ve been on sabbatical since January — five months largely given over to caregiving, and to clearing half a century of my aunt and uncle’s life out of a house on the other side of the country. In May, I went to Ontario to be with my mum and my uncle, who live in different cities, before flying to New York for something I knew I had to give myself before I returned to clinic work with an empty tank. I was in deep need of a refill. I have to practice what I preach.
And the entire time I was in New York, my phone kept lighting up with calls from Ontario, where I’d been just days before — two seniors with dementia, in two different cities, both suddenly in acute health crisis, both at moments described to me as potentially their last days. I was being asked to hold the possibility of losing them while standing on a rooftop in Manhattan, or sitting in a circle at Omega, or walking the High Line in the rain. As I was being dropped at the airport to fly home to Vancouver — after an incredible lunch with another dream duo, Kathy and Kali, who I’ll have to write about another time — I got a call from an ER doctor: my mother had just been admitted and might not last the week.
She did. The crisis passed. My uncle, Stjepan, not long after, did not — he died shortly after I returned. I don’t fully know how to explain what it’s like to have your soul cracked open by grief and by joy at the same time, in the same week, sometimes in the same hour. But I think many of you know this feeling. Caregiving has done something to my heart this year, more than any year before it — widened it, made it more porous, more able to receive love and to see the light inside a person even when many of the circuits in their brain have darkened. So maybe it makes sense that I arrived in New York already raw, already open, and met exactly the women I needed to meet.
That’s the backdrop. Here’s what happened.
Cathy — the city in the rain
With Cathy Joseph, I got New York in a downpour.
And not gentle rain — torrential, the kind that soaks you through within a block and doesn’t let up for a second. If you ever want to test a person’s optimism, hand them a day like that. Cathy didn’t flinch. She stayed bright the entire time, drenched and delighted, as though the weather were just another thing to be curious about.
We spent the day walking everywhere, punctuated by a long, delicious Italian lunch and a luxurious dinner at the end of the day. We walked the High Line in the wet our umbrellas doing Irish Jigs with passersby while she shared her reflections on the city, which is exactly what she does in her writing, except now I was getting it live, seeing New York through her eyes. She’s lived a few lives in this one. She’s positive and bright and endlessly interested, which somehow makes her endlessly interesting. A whole day with her felt like a gift.
I first came to know Cathy through Substack, in a bimonthly Zoom circle called Substack Sirens, brought together by another writer, SuddenlyJamie— whose own writing is potent and well worth your time. Cathy later appeared in a Pink Zones piece I wrote about her approach to talking with strangers. Funny, then, that meeting her in person felt like the opposite of meeting a stranger.
Omega
Then I went up to Omega, in the Hudson Valley, for a retreat led by two writers and teachers whose work I’ve long loved — Elise Loehnen and Satya Doyle Byock. I shouldn’t have been surprised that they drew women who felt like a match for me. But I was. The conversations were heartfelt and deep and, just as often, light and funny. I left lit up. I still am.
Anita — the return
And the Hudson Valley is where Anita lives now — she moved there a few years ago, splitting her year between New York and Mexico, where she’s from. I took a 35-minute taxi from Omega to her home, where her husband Toby — a delightful, talented playwright — was recovering from knee surgery. When I saw her, there was an instant recognition so strong I teared up.
I first met Anita in 2008, in a garden in Santa Barbara, when my heart had been broken open by the ending of one of the biggest, most hopeful chapters of my life — a chapter that included my first marriage, 160 acres of land, and a cob home we’d built off the grid, all of which I had just walked away from. She has known me across versions of myself. One of her clearest memories of me, she said, is one I happen to have a photo of — me in a basil patch, lit up with pure happiness. We’ll always have that garden.
This time we talked about the ranch we both lived on, her women’s circle, her life in Mexico. Her daughter Iris lives in Mexico City now and was there visiting her parents Iris is an Ayurvedic doctor, a kindred spirit. We remembered a night long ago when we stood in the streets of Oakland, the night Obama was elected, all of us feeling the electricity of a moment that felt like hope itself. Such a different landscape now, and it felt so good to be together with this family for an afternoon again.
But here’s what Anita gave me that I’m still sifting. She believes my pull toward the Pink Zones — toward sitting with elders, gathering their wisdom — isn’t something I learned in my studies and clinic. It’s ancestral. Returning to my own old world Croatian roots. Anita would know. She’s the most rooted woman I’ve ever met, fiercely connected to where she comes from. Years ago, she founded a nonprofit, the Conservation of the American Pyramids, and has led many trips to study at Teotihuacan — I was lucky enough to go on one with her, a story I save for the book. She is, in the truest sense, a keeper of that knowledge. She reminded me that the way forward often runs straight back through where we began.
Melinda — the wingwoman
On my way back out of New York, at the end of it all, there was Melinda.
I met Melinda Blau in person for the first time on this trip — Melinda, who is 82 and just about the coolest person I know. She met me right off the train from Omega, in a neighbourhood that isn’t her usual haunt, and we set off hunting for a rooftop patio — riding elevators up and down only to discover most of them didn’t open till five. We were early. It didn’t matter. With Melinda, the in-between is the good part.
I got to watch her in her element — with doormen, with strangers, with whoever crossed our path. She’s charming and direct and very New York, and she has a quality I can only describe as ready. Ready to get familiar with anyone, ready for the unexpected turn, ready to strike a spark off whatever the moment hands her. With Melinda, you’re going to have an experience. There’s no version of an afternoon where nothing happens.
She’s the one who gave me the idea of “picking up my old ladies” — it’s from her incredible book, The Wisdom Whisperers, her name for the older women we choose as guides and soul friends. On this trip she told me she’d be happy to be one of mine. On this trip she told me she'd be happy to be one of mine. I nearly levitated off that rooftop deck.
What I brought home
Shortly after returning home to Vancouver, I went to a party where each guest was asked to bring a favourite line of Shakespeare. I brought Cleopatra — from Antony and Cleopatra:
“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety: other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies.”
The Bard wrote it about a queen. But I’d just spent a month in the company of women it describes perfectly — women whose vitality hasn’t dimmed with time but deepened. Women who make you hungry “where most they satisfy”. There it is: the whole Pink Zones thesis, four centuries early.
This is what I mean when I talk about visibility. Not one of these women is the most remarkable for how she looks. Yes, every one of them is impossible to look away from — because of what she generates, what she’s lived, what she pulls toward her. We keep being told that women grow invisible with age. I don’t think we become invisible. I think we become less available to a culture that only ever knew how to value us as ornaments. That’s a different thing entirely. And the women who’ve stopped waiting to be looked at are, I’ve noticed, the most magnetic people in any room.
Just before I left for all of this, I lit the first Bonfire in Vancouver — a gathering of women, in person, inspired by the work Shannon Watts is doing to bring vital women together in real life. I didn’t fully know what I was starting. I only knew the room felt like something I’d been hungry for. And here’s what I keep noticing: every time I describe it to a woman, something happens in her face. She leans in. She says some version of I want that too. I’ve been craving exactly that.
I went looking to fill my own hunger this spring. What I found, everywhere I turned, was that the appetite is shared.
My tank is full again — fuller than full. And somehow it still feels like the beginning of something I can’t get enough of.
Lovely, Dr. Heidi! Like a tall, cool glass of water on a hot day!