My husband Bill and I have spent the first 15 years of our
marriage in sometimes widely varying frames of mind. These can range from chaos and anxiety to
harmony and relaxation… and everything in between. When we got married we had 5 children between
us and did our best to form a new “blended” family. A few years into this transformation, our
first grandchild was born.
At various times along the way, Bill would turn to me and
say, “Where’s the key to the cabin?” or “Let’s pack up and go to the cabin.” Of course, we had no such cabin. We’d simply struggle through whatever crisis
we were having at that time and come out on the other side.
One year Bill found the key to the cabin in his Christmas stocking. True, it has no “teeth” so it won’t open any
door I know of. But it symbolized that
place we could go to when things got tough.
This year we took a vacation in the middle of a really
outrageously cold and snowy winter. We
visited Bill’s sister Peggy and her husband John, who had become “snowbirds”,
living in Maine during the summer and Florida in the winter. They live in a sunny mobile home park in a
beautiful renovated manufactured home.
They took their motorhome out of storage and arranged to park it across
the street, so we could have our own space… a guest suite! Somewhere during that visit, a seed sprouted
and we began to entertain the idea of buying a motorhome. We could use it to tool around in Maine and
environs in the summers and then, when we could finally retire, take it for a
long trip across the United States.
All we had to do now was wait to see if the little sprout could
take root and grow.
