I'm in my seventh year of retirement now, and I have to confess: I like it more than I thought I would. Retirement is not a sojourn in the Garden of Eden, of course. There are financial adjustments to make when half your income disappears, and the current economic mess has certainly not spared those of us on Social Security. I also have a suspicion that, as my husband and I move from our 60s into our 70s and - hopefully - beyond, we may make the acquaintance of more medical practitioners than are currently in our personal phone book.

Still, the joys of retirement are many, and a surprising number of those come unanticipated, at least by me. For example, I always thought the colleagues who retired before me looked terrific when we met; it never occurred to me that simply getting eight hours of sleep a night could accomplish that.

And I've come to cherish Sunday afternoons, the time when, for my 35 years as a public high school English teacher, my stomach would tighten into knots that could only be eased by hours of rereading texts, planning lessons, and correcting piles of papers and exams. The sheer delight I feel now when I put my feet up to watch an NFL game with my husband (who spent countless Sundays alone when I was working) may be beyond explaining to someone who didn't step to the front of a classroom at 7:25 each Monday morning.

Many of the smallest pleasures of my retirement are daily delights: Reading the morning paper in the morning. Doing the crossword. Enjoying a novel while it's still on the bestseller list. Watering the plants on the deck each summer with a watering can - slowly, so I can really look at each one.

This slowing down is the part of retirement I most looked forward to, and it's even better than I expected. But tight scheduling and multi-tasking, which had become as necessary to me as breathing, were hard habits to break.

My solution to the scheduling overload has been to make only one appointment with a time attached to it each day. I may go to the library, shop for groceries and visit the dentist on the same day, but only the dentist requires that I appear at a particular time. I've discovered that when I'm not racing to the next appointment, I slow down on the highway. If I don't speed, I don't stress. Everything still gets done, but I'm not done in.

Multi-tasking was a tougher nut to crack, since it was for me (and is still for many others) the only way to fit into a day everything that had to be done. Even during my working years, however, I was haunted by Henry David Thoreau's comment that he had gone to live in the woods by Walden Pond because he wished "to live deliberately," to be conscious each moment of what he was doing and why. I knew that I often ran on automatic pilot, with my mind planning lessons or menus as I folded laundry or drove to work. I also knew that living deliberately, or "being present" as I lived my life, meant slowing down enough to do one thing at a time and think about it while I did it. But I couldn't pull it off.

Now, retired, I can make it work. Not reporting to a classroom each day means I can shop for groceries during off hours and stand marveling at the displays of fresh produce from around the world while the snow is hip deep outside. Slowing down means that I sometimes simply stop, sit and listen to a piece of music. (Retirement has gifted me with both Motown and Mozart.) Laundry may still be a chore, but even if I haven't been near the washing machine in almost three weeks, I can still rejoice that I own that much clean underwear.

Not working has also given me what I call "time for denouement," for completing a task and tying up all the loose ends. I paint Easter eggs for friends each year, for example, and last spring I had a fresh idea while I was still up to my elbows in hard-boiled eggs and tubes of paint. So after Easter Sunday had passed, I sat down with a couple of eggs, practiced the new pattern to work out the kinks in the procedure, and wrote the directions down before I packed everything away. During my working life, I would have just cleared the mess away and plunged into the next project, hoping I'd remember the new idea when Lent rolled around again.

Sometimes the denouement involves the luxury of simply following a train of thought all the way to the end. I was nearing the conclusion of A.S. Byatt's wonderful novel Possession when I began to wonder if the central characters had in fact existed, two minor Victorian poets I'd somehow missed despite my years of studying and teaching British literature. Time with the encyclopedia and internet answered that question - they hadn't - and, in another hour or two, a spate of other questions that once would have gone unanswered for lack of time. I have the time now to keep learning about the things I most love.

Having more time available also means that, if I'm still, I may discover who else lives on this piece of land my husband and I call "ours": The hawk that lands on the side lawn one morning. Two spotted fawns with their mother early one afternoon. Dozens of dragonflies one hot summer day, hovering just beyond the deck, glinting jewel colors in the sunlight. And, if I can stand motionless by the feeder in the cold, the chickadees who swoop in to perch only inches away, the only sound the flutter of their wings in the still air.

Time, then, is the greatest luxury of retirement. During our working years we live wide, spreading ourselves out, often too thinly, over house chores and work chores and family chores and community chores. We even talk about "covering all the bases" and "covering" our children's hockey games and piano recitals.

In retirement, we live deep. Relieved of some responsibilities, we pour ourselves more profoundly into those commitments we choose still to honor and into the pleasures, large and small, that make us, even in this economy, rich.

(Joan Mountford of Deerfield is a retired English teacher and sometime poet and essayist.)