To be more accurate, my enemy of late is named the lack of time. Recently I wrote about finding balance and was starting to feel I was on the right track. Then Jim and I both got sick AGAIN, as in for the fifth time since early November. We spent the days after Christmas coughing constantly, sore all over, and simply done in and worn out. Jim’s serious cold turned into pneumonia and I became his caretaker while still feeling lousy myself. We started 2014 in pretty terrible shape.
As the woman in front of us at Costco talked to Jim about her love of the memory foam pillows we were purchasing, I was fading in and out, thinking of what needed to be done when we arrived home and what to make for dinner. My fragmented mind suddenly heard the words “in my Roadtrek camper” and my attention returned to her like a laser beam.
On our way into the store, Jim and I had stopped outside to admire the gorgeous Roadtrek camper in the parking lot. Along with Tiger campers, Roadtreks are our top choice of “dream camper we can never afford without winning the lotto”. Now, in the checkout line, our exuberant pillow lady, turned out to be the owner of that amazing ride. I congratulated her on her beautiful camper and she proceeded to tell us how she sold everything several years ago and became a nomad. As we enthusiastically took in this news she said “the price of stuff is your freedom”, and we literally were frozen in our tracks.
One year ago today, we went to the Humane Society and brought home our sweet boy Porter. Still reeling from the loss of our beloved Maddy, we knew that having a new fur face would help heal our hearts and bring life back into our house.
“Your dream is not big enough if it doesn’t scare you”
FEAR. We all experience it, whether it be the everyday fear of spiders or a debilitating fear of the dark. I’m sure we all just as often find our actions paralyzed by our fears. Fear of commitment. Fear of death. Fear of being along. Fear of failure. Fear of Success.
Torre DeRoche wrote a book about her fear, “Love, with a Chance of Drowning”, and is encouraging the rest of us to face our fears by recording them for all to see and even throwing some competitive spirit into it with a contest. Reading some of the other entries, I started to think about what really scares me to my bones. My first immediate thought was losing Jim. I realize the loss of a spouse is a bit of a pat answer to some but we are truly soul mates. We’ve been together more years than we have lived apart. We are nearly inseparable; commuting together, living together, and for our round-the-world spending 24/7 together for 14 months. The mere though of losing him brings me to my knees, breathless, and unable to comprehend how I could go on.
Mist swirled above the lake, alternately framing and shrouding the fisherman’s boat. It was early morning at Timothy Lake, and the sun was trying to break through, highlighting Mt. Hood in the distance.
It might have been inevitable. Even as we purchased our Palomino Pop-Top Camper two years ago, the question was there; “Is this really the right camper for our long road trip south?” Logan & Brianna of PanAm Notes were completely supportive, being in mid-trip themselves with the exact same camper. Others now on the road, such as Ken & Anaka of 30forThirty, are happily driving pop-tops. We knew it could work for us, it was more a questions of did we want it to?
Some places call to you, fill a place in your soul, and make you feel like you’ve come home; sometimes even if it’s the first time you’ve been there. I’ve had several of those experiences over the years; Vernazza, Italy on the Cinque Terre, Istanbul, Turkey, and Chiang Mai, Thailand, but the one place we’ve been to more than anywhere else in the world, and the place we keep finding ourselves going back to, is Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Dove Lewis is, as the staff purports “The place you hope you never need but are glad it’s there”. That was exactly our experience when it was time for Maddy to leave us; although everyone dreads the idea of having to take their beloved pet to their final vet visit, it was a huge blessing to us that they are available 24-hours/day and so she didn’t have to endure a long and painful night before our normal vet opened.Founded in 1973, Dove is the only 24-hr, non-profit emergency and ICU animal hospital in Oregon.
I know I’ve been silent on this blog for the last several weeks. The passing of our beloved Maddy shattered us. After the first few days of constant crying jags, we tried to learn to adjust without her in our lives and it was devastating. She had become such a constant in our lives that, with her gone, we truly understood the absolute silence that existed without her. Morning was our special mommy & Maddy time…. we’d go outside for a pee and then she’d eat her breakfast and sit in the kitchen, watching me intently, while I told her what the day was to bring as I made coffee and lunches. Now, I found myself alone and would collapse into great gulping sobs, finding myself hunched over, hypher-ventilating, feeling as though I’d been gut-punched. Continue reading
