The weeks news. Change, and moving on.
It’s been an emotional week up here on the mountain. Planning and listing your place is one thing, but when someone makes an offer, that’s another. It has been a bag of mixed emotions here this past week, since someone has finally made us an offer. Now, I look around a cabin I built and wonder if I really wanted this. I know that my disability would eventually force me to consider leaving my home, a home that I built pretty much with my own hands. I look at the hearth, which I spent days gathering the stones for it from this mountain, then still more days building it. I gathered stone, many pickup loads, and took months building a stone wall next to the driveway. I look at the kitchen, which was the first room I built on the already existing 12′ X15′ cabin, then look at everything the lovely wife and I have done together, and have second thoughts.
I wrote seven books here, the first of which was enough that a stranger wanted to visit, to see for herself if things were like I wrote them. She ended up becoming the lovely wife, who has been by my side these last seven years through the good and the bad, the terrible weather during winter, and the crappy roads the rest of the year. She learned how to ride a snowmobile up here, and we fought this road with one damn machine or another for the first few years she was here. Things have improved a bit since then, but they aren’t going to change much more for a few more years, I suspect. My disability has gotten to the point that I will not be able to handle the outside chores for much longer, and that means the lovely wife has to not only work, but keep roofs clear of snow so they aren’t carrying too much weight. That’s too much on her shoulders.
We have come accustomed to the moose that hang around here, a few have become like family, and we both enjoy it when they show up. We leave a mineral like for them in the winter, and one has brought her newborn offspring right up the driveway as if to show off. We will miss that I think most of all.
I had thought I would look forward to moving back to New England, and in many ways I do. Yet, I can’t help thinking about what I have here, what I have built, the early memories I made, and, then, those the lovely wife and I have made together. We have laughed, loved, cried, and fought this mountain together many times. In the process, we have forged a bond with each other that many never do. Am I ready for the next chapter? I can say with certainty that I am. Will I miss everything we have here? Again, I can say with the same amount of certainty that I will.
Life is all about change; that is the one constant thing in the universe that we can count on. Change can be good, and things can be learned along the way. I am as ready as I will ever be for what this next chapter brings as I move through the winter of my life.
That’s all the news for the week. Bye for now, but not forever.
