On our recent trek across the English Cotswolds, with Claire, my dear friend of 40+ years, we shared how so much fresh air and walking cleared our minds.

Adventure, Men, and aging know-how popped up as essential concerns for my life’s last chapter. And of course, how to reconcile regrets.

Adventure is the easiest. It includes travel; I hope to do all I can possibly afford, but authenticity in my behavior and honesty in my writing also rank high.

Next comes men: what to do about them? They feel like a different species when they don’t talk, they don’t listen, they sleep too much. Or they simply can’t hear.

Looking back, I was naive. When I got together with my only husband, in 1971, I felt everything would always be hunky-dory. He was perfect, very smart, which was my first criterion, and he had had an exciting life. So far. He was quirky, having slept in his old, dug-out Volvo for a year or so. He lived in a stilted cottage, raised up in the sand of Plum Island, a beach community outside of Newburyport, Massachusetts. A successful town of sea captains, with umpteen widows walks atop lovely established homes. Newburyport had been the first capital of Massachusetts, prior to Boston. Back in the olden days.

Back in my olden days, in the early 1970s, my husband and I were in love. I surmised we would always be happy. Twenty years and two amazing children later, that wasn’t the case. My husband got mad at me if I placed glasses for washing (his dinnertime job) on the wrong side of the sink.

He fell asleep on the floor most every night after completing his dinnertime job (his daytime job fixing boats was way beneath his privileged background and supreme intelligence as a physics nerd). He woke up to read to the kids; he was a doting father back then. He was depressed.

I was bored. Suffice it to say, although I adored my children and was lucky to own and operate the then oldest children’s bookstore in Maine. I was in my early 40s. With no previous experiences of adventure, travel, or adolescence, I looked for love — and excitement! — in all the wrong places.

The men I chose after I left my husband: from a liar and crook; to a bisexual weirdo; to a Boston bearded religious Jew; to addicts, from drugs to video games; to a former academic drunken poet; to an allergic-to-everything journalist. None of whom became second or third or fourth husbands. I want them to rest in the shadows. But they don’t and never will.

So I take off on my own adventures, alone or with dear women friends.

But this year is greater than the men I’ve somehow connected with: it’s about me and my last chapter, navigating my 80s; my pride in my daughter’s latest book, “A God-Shaped Nation” (pub date June 9, Grove Atlantic), and my son’s upcoming Father’s Day of two amazing children; planning more travel adventures; and preparing myself for old(er) age.

I have regrets. One is that I wasn’t able to work out a fifty-year marriage history with my one husband, for my children and for a longer life story with my early love. I could have but I didn’t know how in the early 1990s.

So here I am.