A year ago we were leaving a Gulf-coast barrier island in Florida that was in the path of Hurricane Ian. We had put up hurricane shutters before expecting to come back to an intact home with all our possessions waiting on us. It wasn’t to be this time. Now we are living in a nice apartment complex in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in upstate South Carolina. We are recouping our lives, but much is different.

The past six months have been a period of transition. We are getting used to apartment living. We like the release from responsibilities living in a house. We miss the backyard pool and the ability to leave Sweetie in the house where she’d be safe and comfortable while we were out. Now she goes everywhere with us. We feel relief that we are not in the immediate threat of a hurricane as we live over 200 miles away from the Atlantic coast.

There have been many changes in our lives. I found a new church. Every Sunday morning I walk to the nearby Waffle House for a cheese omelet, hashbrowns, bacon, decaf, and no toast. Then I take a 15-minute walk up the Swamp Rabbit Trail to a very friendly, welcoming church. In the past month I have assumed biweekly duties as an usher/greeter. In a recent sermon, the preacher informed us that storms are part of our lives. We are either coming out of a storm, in a storm, or going into a storm. It was obvious to me that the storm we were coming out of was Ian.

There have been other changes in our lives as well. Our 2000 Buick LeSabre stranded Betty one Sunday evening while I was recovering from a respiratory illness. She lost her lights right about dusk and pulled into a closed VW dealer’s lot. Our niece and nephew, Jennifer and Ben, came to her rescue. Turns out that a switch that controlled the lights, windshield wipers, and other dashboard amenities needed replacement. It took about 30 days to locate a control switch and have it replaced. We were fortunate to have a rent-free loaner from our auto-repair place. All was well with our LeSabre until we got caught in a rainstorm returning from a wedding in Georgia and the wipers stopped working. It was time to upgrade our car.

Well, we learned that there have been major changes in automobiles since the 2000 and 2005 models we were used to! We went to CarMax to survey the field of recent used cars and learned that we didn’t even know how to start a car without a key! We knew that we wanted a sedan that provided a comfortable ride, but we had very different concepts of how to proceed. My strategy for narrowing our selection down to a few models and her effort to expand the selection pool did not mesh. We drove a Chrysler 300 (nice ride but poor reliability ratings), a Toyota Camry (good reliability and an adequate ride), and a Buick LaCrosse (a beautiful car with uncomfortable seats and a stiff ride). We had heard about and ridden in SUVs, but neither one of had driven one. We test drove a Toyota RAV-4, but neither of us were impressed. Then we tried a 2022 Honda CR-V with less than 5000 miles on it, and it was love at first ride! Our long-suffering salesman, Cleo, was relieved. We named our new CR-V Cleo.

Our first trip out of state in our new vehicle was the 750 miles back to Sanibel. We had been trying to sell our house/property from a distance. Our real-estate agent had found some buyers. We signed two offers, but the deals fell through. We had other offers that we chose not to accept. Selling the house was a source of serious tension between Betty and me. I just wanted to sell the damn thing, and Betty wanted to make sure we received its full value from the sale. The property had been on the market for 6 months and was becoming a money pit. Our mission was to visit with our current agent and also contact another agent to see if we needed to make a change. It became apparent that our current agent was not as actively pursuing the sale as we would like, and the potential agent had ideas to make our house and property more marketable without large outlays of cash. We decided to change realtors.

Our contract with our first realtor, who was operating on his own, expired a few weeks after our visit. Our new realtor was a co-owner of a realty company. She assigned an agent who worked directly with me by phone daily to start fixing the house up and taking better photos of it and the property. The house was off the market for less than two weeks. We received two offers the day before it went on the market that were lower than our asking price. Later that afternoon we received an offer for the full asking price! We accepted the offer and then waited the 30 days until closing. There were a few glitches, but the sale went through. It was such a relief! Even after the sale it took me a few days to believe that it really happened.

One sidelight of the trip down to Sanibel was that when we walked into the house, we found Betty’s bike that she loved so much. I had asked the contractor who cleaned out the house and all of its belongings if he could save her bike. I had never heard back from him and assumed that it went out on the street with the other junk! The bike was rusty but salvageable. When we got back to South Carolina she had her bike refurbished, and I bought a used one. We were ready to ride! Betty and Sweetie have been my constant companions for the past year. Almost every morning the three of us ride our bikes from Travelers Rest to Berea and back, a journey of about 9 miles, roundtrip. The gentle downward slope to Berea becomes a challenging upward climb coming back. We love the refreshing time together.

Our daily lives have been a series of ups and downs. So many little things that needed to be done! How does anyone who has a day job ever get these things done? Or does being retired magnify the importance of the minutiae in our lives? Other things were not so little. Within 60 days of buying our new vehicle, I was in an accident and it was judged to be my fault—the second one in less than a year! The side of the SUV was hit by a commercial van. No one was injured, the van’s bumper was lightly scratched, but there was extensive damage to the rear door of the CR-V on the driver’s side. Life’s ups and downs go on! The storm we have been in since Ian has involved dealing with insurance companies, negotiating two moves, selling a gutted house and surrounding yard, coping with the loss of a lifestyle and work regimen that we loved, and trying to figure out what our new lives would look like.

Betty, Sweetie, and I are adjusting to our current life. We spend almost all our waking hours together even though our sleep schedules are very different. Betty and I are getting to know each other on a different level than we experienced in our five years of courtship and fifty-one years of marriage. In many ways we are closer to each other than ever before, but constant exposure to each other provides more opportunities for tensions to emerge. Sweetie continues to be a true companion and a comfort in our lives.

This Fall I am back enjoying participating in my Fantasy Football League. I have retired the Sanibel Sea Turtles who lost the league championship by 3 points last year! Don’t worry, that is all over and forgotten. 3 points!!! The Travelers Rest Swamp Rabbits have won twice and lost once to this point in the 2023 season.

I find that I have traded in the anger I mentioned in an earlier post for impatience and anxiety. Truth be told—neither impatience nor anxiety are new in my life. I inherited both from my parents. It feels like I should be over this disruption in my life, and yet. It’s not the loss of so many possessions. In many ways we are more free as minimalists than we were with a house full of stuff. There are certain items that we do miss, but we can live without them. Betty misses her job and her friends at the library. I miss the food pantry and its volunteers. Neither one of us have filled those gaps in our lives. Operating with one car restricts our mobility. Friends haven’t been as easy to make up here.

When my parents, sister, and I left the Canadian prairie to move 1700 miles across the continent to South Carolina, we left our family behind. When Betty, Sweetie, and I moved to SW Florida we left my sister and Betty’s family behind. A return to SC is also a return to family, and they have been so wonderful to us. Lorie and Rich, another niece and nephew, let us stay in an apartment in their home rent free until we could find a place of our own. It was one of four such invitations we received from family for a place to stay. A party of five relatives moved us to our new apartment including donating furniture and paintings. How great is that? How great it is to be part of a family again!

The future is still unknown. We have visited six different retirement communities to settle into our forever home. Earlier this month we put down a deposit to place us on a waiting list. Our estimated wait time could be from one up to three years, but we have an option of passing on an invitation if we are not yet ready. I anticipate a move sometime in the next five years. In the interim we hope to be able to return some of the support to family members as they have been so good to us.

I’m looking for a mission to replace the volunteer work I did at the food pantry every Monday evening in Florida. My work there provided me with a sense of satisfaction helping others and the comradery we enjoyed each week. There are opportunities out there, but I have not actively pursued them to this point. Readers of this blog have noticed that I have not been as diligent to produce a post each week. Part of that has been due to lack of time and lack of motivation to meet deadlines. I do not plan on discontinuing my efforts, but I don’t foresee weekly postings anytime soon. Postings twice a month is a more likely scenario.

Take home lesson. Life is uncertain, particularly in times of climate change. An estimated 3.4 million Americans were driven out of their homes by natural disasters in 2022. Climate change wasn’t the cause of these disasters, but I believe it made most of them worse. Being made a victim makes it real on a personal level. And we were among the lucky ones! Many suffered serious injury or illness, even death. Not everyone had family that took them in. Not everyone was able to sell their house and able to move into a comfortable apartment. We are grateful that we have each other and a good life. And yet there are scars still there affecting us subtly as we try to develop new chapters in our lives.

Pastor Brian told us about the storms we face in life. Ian was the storm we came out of a year ago. Readjusting our lives and dealing with all the details of relocating to South Carolina has been the storm we have lived in since Ian. The storms of wind and relocation are behind us, but others may be on the horizon. We are determined to move forward as we face them together with the help of our family.

Coming soon: Aspartame and other chemicals in my food