Wednesday, April 24, 2013

A Big Deal to Us

Our two sons helping me get our household furnishings
packed up and into storage in March 2012.
Well, it might not seem like a big deal to you, but it is to us.   My wife and I have finally settled on how we’re going to attempt to live out the next chapter of our lives. 

Ever since being “ripped away” from our very happy normal life in Colorado thanks to health issues, we have been wondering and wandering and wavering and wishing we had “the answer” for where to live.  We’ve prayed about it, debated it continuously between ourselves, consulted family, friends and occasionally the random passer-by who would give ear to our plight. 

Instinctively, we started out seeking a “replacement house”.  The replacement house would replace what had been our home in Colorado.  It would be a place for us to start to build new community, and to receive all of our ‘currently in storage’ worldly possessions.  We were looking for a place that was low altitude, and also was a climatic change from our Maine condo, where we’d been holing up since departing our home. 

We do love Maine, but our condo there didn’t seem like a “home” to us, as we’d initially bought it as a place to escape to.  Colorado had been our home for the last 25 years.  That’s where we’d lived our lives, raised our kids and where it felt like home 'should be'.

However, things change.  And we knew there was no longer a home for us in Colorado.  So, after a 'near miss' buying a “big box” house in St. Simons Island, GA, we have settled into a plan where our Maine place will be our home from May to the end of the calendar year (more or less), and then we will ‘escape’ to Vero Beach, Florida.  We found a very sweet, very small place in Vero that we hope to close on in early June. 

In the process of seeking a ‘big box’ home where our furniture and possessions could be comfortable, Jackie came to the conclusion that she didn’t want to move so far away to start a new life—so far from family, and friends and the growing sense of ‘community’ that we’ve enjoyed in Maine.  And we are facing the reality that "downsizing" at this stage of life is totally appropriate.  Jackie was right.  As usual, she was right. 

We are traveling home to Colorado next week to go through all our stored up stuff, and segregate the stored flotsam and jetsam into two basic “piles of stuff”.  One pile will be shipped to Maine, and the other pile will be carted off to Vero Beach.  

We won’t have enough room for much more stuff in Maine, but at least we can 'deal with it' there--much better than having our stuff in storage 2500 miles away from where we're living.  And we will have taken a giant step toward feeling “settled” for the first time in a couple of years.

And, at long last, to the relief of my wife, when somebody asks where we live, I won’t feel compelled to give a long, complicated, boring answer that contains way too much information.   I can simply say “Maine is now home, but we have a winter place to get away to in Vero Beach”.

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