Time Passages

In yesterday's Hodgepodge I asked readers what they were doing five years ago, and decided I'd make that more or less the subject of today's post. When not a lot is going on in your corner of the world you have to reach a little for blog content.

After I asked the question it occurred to me that we've been at this whole Corona mess for five long months (feels like years) so I started wondering what we were doing just prior, and decided to take a peek back at that too.

Five months ago...we were in the first few days of everybody stay home !!! Stay far and away from everybody else in the entire world including your own extended family !!! Now in our house we'd been discussing the virus for a solid two months prior as it hit South Korea hard in January. A friend reminded me yesterday how we'd had a conversation back then, so concerned about my daughter and her family, never imagining we'd be in the same boat just a short time later.

Five months ago hubs and I drove home after spending a long weekend with friends in Florida. Things were open when we headed down, but closed by the time we headed home. The shutdown happened almost overnight. We ate lunch at Chick-fil-a coming back and it was only their first or second day of strictly take out. Of course Chick-fil-a is awesome and handled the upheaval like it was no big deal.

I don't know if anyone imagined in March we'd still be slogging through this insanity five months later, yet here we are. Who's over it?

Five years ago...I wrote a post entitled Retirement Day 187. Currently we are in Retirement Day 2000 so I guess time really does fly when you're having fun. By the way, it's going swimmingly.

Except for the pandemic and the unrest across America and the general nastiness online and the no travel-no-houseguests-no making plans, but other than that it's going swimmingly.

Five years ago we took a fun trip up the East Coast to attend a friend's daughter's wedding.

We drove from New Jersey to Prince Edward Island Canada and thoroughly enjoyed eating our weight in lobster rolls, the staggering beauty of Maine and PEI, and in-person time spent with real life friends.

Also, five years ago I apparently still took pictures with a good camera and not just so-so pictures with a phone.

I would so love to jump in the car and take a road trip somewhere new and pretty and not give a thought to hotel cleanliness, gloving up to pump gas, masking up to get out of the car, or doing math to calculate how many gallons of hand sanitizer we'd need for the journey.

Five years ago we sold our house in New Jersey and spent six weeks living with my mama before heading south. I'm sure she was ready for us to take all our stuff and get on with things, but five years later would give anything to have us back in her house for six weeks.

Six days even.
I haven't seen my mom in person since January.

While we were living with my mom our old and beloved dog died. Five years later her name is still mentioned on a fairly regular basis with an ache in our hearts and smiles on our faces.

NJ winters could easily last into summer, but this photo wasn't actually taken in August. I like it though, and it is five years old. This beautiful pup was something else and when she was gone we said we'd never have another. Letting them go is too hard and we travel too much and have too much company and blah blah blah.

About that same time Daughter1 brought a puppy into her Washington State home and now that puppy is a five year old dock diver living his best life on a Carolina lake. Go figure. And his mama is raising our two favorite boys on the other side of the world, which is something else we didn't see coming five years back.

Five years ago we moved from New Jersey to South Carolina. Not to this house, but to a cozy apartment just across the parking lot from Daughter2's cozy apartment. Those were the days!

Well maybe not really 'the days' because it wasn't a huge amount of space, and we were so anxious and excited to get this house built, but also yes it kind of really was 'the days'. Apartment living meant we didn't have to think about home maintenance and repairs, dock maintenance and repairs, boat maintenance and repairs, catching beavers before they destroy the landscaping, and a host of other assorted bits and bobs that go hand in hand with home ownership.

Then again, there were no early morning lake sunrises where the sky turns pink before your very eyes, no magical light dancing on the water, no boating to dinner, no big porches for napping and reading and enduring this weird season that in 2015 we didn't know was coming, and for that I'm grateful.

Five months may have dragged, but five years have flown.
Time is funny like that.

"The best thing about the future is it comes one day at a time." 

attributed to various speakers...true for us all

Retirement-Day 183

But who's counting?

I kid! Retirement is busy. There are lots of days I wonder how hubs ever found the time to go to work every Monday through Friday, not to mention all the Saturdays and Sundays he traveled to some upside down time zone in order to be ready for a Monday morning meeting on the other side of the globe.

There are also days I think, hmmm...he needs to go to work today. He's realizing those are the days I need him to go play golf, wash the cars, or do something somewhere besides where I am.

Does that sound awful? I don't mean it to sound awful, because on the whole retirement is grand. Of course it will be grander once the house is underway, but in the interim we're livin' the high life in our cozy apartment.

There is so little to manage in terms of daily living. I can clean the entire place in an hour, and we have very little here in the way of belongings, which makes me occasionally stop and ask myself why it is exactly we're building a house? 

Oh yeah...

The water.
We need to see the water.

Hubs and I realized after moving in here that the layout of this apartment is almost identical to the very first apartment we lived in as newlyweds.

Except we have actual furniture here, not plants pretending to be furniture, wooden crates picked up on the side of the road, or a T.V. with an antennae that needs adjusting. We don't have jobs to go to everyday either, which is both a pro and a con.

Not so much a con really, just something that requires a little figuring out and of course we're only in this setting temporarily, so no sense diving too deeply into much more than the house build for now. Hubs has plans to do something, and I have plans to do something, but first we supervise-ha!

Other items I've noted in our temporary digs-

I have an electric stove here and am so not a fan. I grew up with an electric stove, but our house in the UK had a gas cooktop and my house in NJ also had a gas cooktop, and once you've cooked on gas you only want to cook on gas. My lake house will have gas.

I'd kind of forgotten about that whole hauling thing apartment living requires. Maybe blocked is a better word, because I did move my girls no less than fourteen times from dorm room to storage unit to apartment to storage unit and back again not so long ago. We're now living on the second floor, and I've successfully re-mastered the skill of carrying seventeen sacks from the car in one trip in order to avoid going back a second time.

Our mail is in a central location here, a box with a key that I check every day like I did when I was in college. No care packages from my mom though, just bills, junk mail, and people confirming our change of address.

There's a lovely pool on site, and a really nice gym too, so hubs and I are taking advantage of both. Most of the time we have them to ourselves, because hey! retirement!

We sent all of our belongings (except for our clothes) to storage and we're living with rentals. A short list of things I wish I'd thrown in the car and brought with me would include a corkscrew, my hand mixer, a pastry brush, spatula, wooden spoon, my iron, and my microplane. Each day I think of just one more thing I should have thought to add to the car, but then I remember there was only exactly enough space left for me in the vehicle when we headed south. Also, the movers packed up my kitchen before I completely thought it through.

Where are my bathing suits?

We've spent a fair amount of time here trying to locate documents and various and sundry items we know we packed or locked in one of our umpteen lock boxes, and this place is not that big, so you'd think getting your hands on what you need would be simple, but no. Still a lot of emptying boxes and then emptying them again later because you are sure that's where you put xyz, but for some reason xyz isn't where you remember putting it.

Attempting to register with a family doctor has been a wee bit trying. More than one physician's office has instructed me to download new patient forms from their website, complete them, and send them back for review. The Dr. will review my 'application' and I'll hear back in 3-4 weeks as to whether or not I'm in. What??? Hello 2015!

We are hopefully nearing the end of the paperwork hoops we have to jump through to break ground on the house, and will sign our actual contract with pricing and all the dotted lines on Tuesday. In this period of trying to transfer everything including our very own selves from one state to another, I'm glad hubs is retired and available to handle some of the icky phone calls and general nonsense like car tags, title transfers, and contracts that need reviewing and tweaking. Normally he's working and that's all my domain.

In this season of retirement though, I'm happy to share.

Yards Not Miles

Some people are lucky enough to have their grown children living nearby. Their whole family in fact pretty much sticks close to the town or at least the state where they were born. They have lunch together on Sunday afternoons and send the leftovers home with whoever wants them. They borrow coats and books and angel food cake pans, and they say hey, let's see a movie next week. They go to ballgames and the farmers market and that new restaurant a neighbor said was good.

And some people live in England while their babies attend university in America.

Or they live on the East Coast while their little girl and the boy she married live on the West Coast.

Or they teach school like a grown up in South Carolina, miles and miles and miles from you.

If your grown children live nearby you may not relate to the cycle of feelings one experiences when children live a day or flight or ocean away. How you start counting down the days on the calendar until 'next time' before 'this time' even gets here. How the anticipation and excitement of seeing your child in the flesh bubbles up in the weeks before a visit, and you know you need to squash that down a little, because they will come and go in what feels like the blink of an eye. You want to throw your heart wide open, but a part of you understands the need for a little self-preservation too.

You know from years of practice that after every hello there will be a goodbye, and that goodbye will hover over your time together if you let it. You understand all too well the supreme effort required to push the end of a visit to the actual end so you don't spend all day Saturday thinking about that airport run on Sunday. You learn something important.

You learn to be present.

We are those people. Those parents whose children have lived away from home since graduating from high school. Whose every trip back to us, to home, has required massive logistics, airports, delays, dollars, lost luggage, traffic jams, toll booths, connections, and hour upon hour in a car-train-plane. We've made peace with this because you cannot show your children the world, tell them it's theirs for the taking, and then demand they live next door.

Can you?
No I don't think you can.

Do  I want to?
Only sometimes.

Mostly I'm so thankful to see my daughters flourish in a world that is hard and often harsh. To see them chase their dreams and live out goals they set for themselves before they could even articulate them as such. To watch as they seek out and follow God's call on their lives.

I absolutely love having young adult children. I love their wit and their style and their compassion and their brains. My once upon a time baby girls have grown into the women I always imagined they would be, only better. They're interesting, independent, funny, and smart. I'm completely amazed at the way genes combine to give us children who are uniquely themselves, yet so much like us we recognize a turn of the wrist or a tilt of the head...their smallest hint of displeasure unexpressed and the drive behind that furrowed brow. A smile that springs from somewhere deep.

If you're in the throws of toddlerhood or living out the drama of the middle years, know the young adult years are worth every ounce of sweat and love and prayer you're pouring in today.

Keep loving well.

We moved into an apartment in South Carolina last Saturday. The same apartment complex my Daughter2 calls home. I can't explain how much I love our new living situation. Yesterday hubs and I were pulling out of a shopping center and noticed someone waving to us from the red light across the street. It was my girl! I guess that sounds a little silly, but y'all we're neighbors and just knowing she's nearby, within walking distance actually, makes my heart sing.

We had breakfast with her last Sunday, I helped set up her classroom on Monday, she walked over for dinner on Tuesday, and on Wednesday she and I enjoyed an hour of mindless but awesome TV aka Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders: Making the Team.  Then I walked the few yards home and she did some work to prepare for the new school year.

When your family lives hundreds or thousands of miles away, every trip back, every single visit, requires moving in with them, operating out of suitcases, interrupting routines, settling for makeshift-it's only for a few days-kind of living. We're used to this, and since our extended families are spread out still we'll continue doing so because it's family and we love them.

But I feel like I've been given a little gift here. A bright spot in the midst of what has been literally nine years of schlepping bags and boxes, of longing for just one more day, one more hour, one more minute of in person time with my girls.

Sometime in the next year we'll move again, still nearby but not within walking distance. Daughter2 will also re-locate one day, and Daughter1 will definitely move from the west coast to ???, maybe closer maybe further and I celebrate that, I really do. I celebrate their willingness to meet life head on, to set down roots, but also to pick them up and re-plant somewhere new when change comes calling.

And it will come calling, again and again and again, which is why I'm going to settle in. I'm going to breathe deeply and embrace with my whole heart this season of geographic nearness. Years of hello and goodbye have taught me a great appreciation for the now.

My feet are so ready for the now, for walking yards instead of miles....

... and loving every single step.