The Gift That Keeps on Giving
WordPress provides a prompt question every day and occasionally, I can’t resist. Todays is about the best purchase I ever made.
We were at a transition point in our lives, leaving the military, facing a temporary geographic separation (AdventureMan off to Saudi Arabia) and he said to me something I’ve always loved, that I’ve been a good wife and to buy a house any where I wanted.
I knew where that would be. I had a clever Mom who, every time I visited her, had set up a realtor to show us condominiums. She always said it was so that when they downsize, they would understand the options, but I also believe she had another agenda – to show me the options. Or so I suspected; my Mom often held her cards close to her chest and I would have to guess at her intentions. Whether or not she intended, she did sell me on the location.
AdventureMan drove one of our cars across the country and spent two days looking at options. He came back excited.
Then when he came back, we packed out everything we intended to keep and sent it to storage. Adventureman departed for Saudi Arabia and I kept working until our house sold, then moved temporarily to an apartment. I looked at a slew of places, and bought a house that looked very boring, but in the community I loved .
The house wasn’t as boring as it looked. What made it look boring was the wall-to-wall beige carpeting. Before I moved in, I had it all ripped out and had natural oak wood floors installed. It seemed horrendously expensive but it had a WOW factor – the house looked gorgeous.
I lived in the house for two years, AdventureMan and I having telephone dates and him dropping into town every few months for conjugal visit, LOL. Then, he got permission for me to live with him in Saudi Arabia.
We rented out the house. We’ve rented it out all these years, only one change in renters, never a single vacant month. I love the house still, and it was the best investment we ever made.
Within a few years, rental income had paid off the mortgage. Every year since then is gravy. We visit the renters now and then to check on the house; they are doing a good job at protecting those beautiful floors. They’d like to buy the house, but we have promised it to our son, who loves it too.
By far, the best purchase we ever made.
Here There and Insanity
I have a group of buddies who gather early in the morning to swim. Everyone needs a group that can help keep them sane, and this is the group for me. We share news updates. We share reactions. We share our own ups and downs. Some of us are elders; we share our aches and pains. And at all of this – we laugh. Thanks be to God; we help each other keep things in perspective and keep a sense of humor about ourselves.
AdventureMan tells me I have a special smile for when I am in Alaska, or when I am on a boat. Both sing to my soul. It’s hard coming off a great vacation, and even harder when a heat dome covers Pensacola and there is barely a whiff of fresh breeze, even by the shore.
I thank God, too, for the life I was given, my time in Alaska, and my time with my husband living in so many different countries in service to our own country. You know, old fashioned things like building alliances, learning foreign cultures and languages, building relationships.
So forgive me if I rant now and then about the craziness I see in our current situation. Sometimes I feel like the blog name should be Here There and Insanity; as Paul says to the Romans, we are doing the things we ought not to do and not doing the good we ought to be doing.
What to do?
Here is what I wish for you – a strong partner, and a loving family. A group, or two or three, of buddies who can help you laugh when insanity happens in the world, and a belief system that can keep you grounded when moral values are topsy-turvy, shaken and tossed out.
“There are places I’ll remember all my life – though some have changed . . . Some forever, not for better, some have gone, and some remained . . . All these places have their moments with lovers and friends I still can recall, Some are dead and some are living – in my life, I’ve loved them all.”
Alaska 2026: Homer Happy Surprises
We are up and eager for our boat trip into the Katchemak Bay. We have cereal and banana, pack up some snacks, and put on our sunscreen. It is not so brightly sunny as prior days, but sunny enough to burn. We find the meeting point, and another couple joins us, then the crew and we get on the boat. Once again, we are four customers and a captain and deckhand.
Even better, the man in the other couple introduces himself and adds “You will notice I have an accent. I am Jordanian.” AdventureMan, ever quick, asks him in Jordanian Arabic “From what part of Jordan do you come,” and we all laugh at his utter astonishment. Once we started talking, we never stopped.
We watched otter, and learned how they attach themselves to the kelp so that they don’t drift too far from their food source.
We saw countless birds, and one great-grand eagle. We saw puffins galore. And at the same time, we were having these conversations, figuring out who we knew in common as we are near to the same age.
We had so much fun with this couple that when the wildlife tour ended, we decided to eat lunch together at Captain Pattie’s on the Homer Spit, a place AdventureMan and I have eaten at on earlier trips to Homer. The wife and I had the Alaska King Crab Legs, which were hideously expensive, but not so expensive as I have seen them in other places, and these were perfectly prepared. True Love: AdventureMan knows me to be a frugal woman. He did not bat an eye when I ordered the King Crab.
I know exactly when I last had Alaska King Crab. It was my birthday, many years ago, and my son and I were staying with my parents in Seattle while my husband attended a military school. As we sat down to dinner, suddenly my husband appeared! He had flown in to surprise me! And my mother served King Crab legs with melted butter, and she made a Baked Alaska for dessert. I must have been 30 years old.
We had such a good meal, and such good conversation. Even the wait staff was part of what felt like a great celebration.
After lunch, we headed out to explore downtown Homer. We ended up at the Homer Farmer’s Market, and oh what fun.
We had thought we wouldn’t buy anything, but I found some Spruce Syrup (like Maple syrup, sort of) and we found some barbecue.
Yes, even though we had just eaten lunch, we knew this BBQ was special, and we ordered up two plates and had them wrapped so we could put them in the little refrigerator and have them for dinner.
They were wonderful! I’d like to say we had them on our deck patio, watching the sun go down, but here’s the problem – the sun doesn’t really go down, or it goes a little bit down but not at dinnertime, more like around two a.m. Even then, as you have seen, it is not DARK dark.
It’s hard to settle down for the evening when it is so light out. We go for a walk in the neighborhood, then come back to catch up – me with my photos and notes on the trip, AdventureMan with his reading.
Alaska 2026: Still the Last Frontier
For a welcome shift in pace and point of view, I am about to take you with AdventureMan and me as we escape “the lower 48” and the current murky political situation and escape, as so many have before us, to Alaska, The Last Frontier.
I’m a born Alaskan. I lived there until I was 11. I still know all the words to the State Song, although Alaska was not a state when I was born; it was still a territory, and became a state while I lived there.
Eight stars of gold on a field of blue
Alaska’s flag. May it mean to you
The blue of the sea, the evening sky,
The mountain lakes, and the flow’rsnearby;
The gold of the early sourdough’s dreams,
The precious gold of the hills and streams;
The brilliant stars in the northern sky,
The “Bear,” the “Dipper,” and, shining high,
The great North Star with its steady light,
O’er land and sea a beacon bright.
Alaska’s flag to Alaskans dear,
The simple flag of a last frontier.
Marie Drake
I am still moved by the song.
Happy Anniversary, AdventureMan
Today I received this.
At first, I thought it was some friend reminding me and wondered who it was, but I think it is a WordPress function, giving me material to post.
Truly, it’s the whole reason I started this blog, twenty years ago. We are human. We forget. As I read, I was back in that earlier time, early COVID, and I forgot how restricting it was. I had a wonderful, brave real estate friend who showed us houses, and then my sweet daughter-in-law called and said “Are you still interested in THIS house?” It was the house we had sold to them ten years before, but now, with a growing family, they wanted something larger and were happy to sell the house back to us, with one condition – that they inherit the house when we move on. We happily agreed.
And here we are, 6 years later, doing what we love to do – travel, see new things and talk with people. We have had the most amazing adventure, back to Alaska. We love stories, we love to hear how people came here, how people live. Yesterday, we had the joy of finding ourselves on board a small ship with just four passengers, one of whom was a Jordanian man, almost our exact age, and we had so many friends in common, and we had so much fun together.
As he introduced himself to us, he said “You will notice I have an accent, I am from Jordan.”
AdventureMan, always quick, responded in Jordanian Arabic, asking which part of Jordan. The look on the doctor’s face cracked us all up, and from that moment, we were not fellow passengers, but family. We ended up having lunch together after the excursion; we couldn’t stop talking.
Tomorrow, we have dinner with a man I graduated from high school with, lo, those many years ago, and who is, in my eyes, a hero. He is a doctor with his own airplane, and he spent his career flying to outlying Alaskan villages and providing medical services to those who otherwise would not have access.
Life is sweet.
Once I get the photos organized and the trip written up, I will share with you. Meanwhile, thank you, WordPress, for the prompt.
Talking With My Mom in the Commissary
“Mom! Look at the price on that flank steak!” When she sent me off to college, one of the pieces of advice she shared with me was never to spend more than $1.25 per pound on flank steak, one of the leanest, thriftiest cuts of beef available. Even four years later, the butcher looked at me in amazement and said “your mother’s information is out of date.”
But when I saw these breathtaking prices – even marked down! – for flank steak, I couldn’t help taking a photo to share with Mom.
Yes, I still talk with my Mom, I can’t help it. She should not have died when she did, one of the earliest victims of COVID. I have so much admiration for the choice she made – she chose not to be intubated. Intubation machines were limited, and she wanted younger people to have priority on their usage. She was 96. Her mother lived to 104. She requested hospice, and went quietly and without pain. I still choke to think of it, but it was her choice, and a heroic choice.
“Can you believe this?” I ask my mother, incredulously. “Hershey’s chocolate FLAVOR! Not even real chocolate!” and Mom replies in my head, telling me not to buy it, it’s just chemicals.
As the oldest daughter, some of my earliest memories are Saturday trips to the supermarket, wheeling the basket while Mom filled it, stopping now and then to chat with shopping neighbors, or to show me a label and what it meant. It was excruciatingly boring. I learned a lot.
She also taughte me to cook. I’m not the greatest cook (neither was she), but, like her, I have a few great recipes that make me look better than I am. Some of them are hers 😊. Even better, when we were cleaning out her condo, I found this old set of measuring spoons, which I brought home and still use. They must be seventy or eighty years old; look how thin the aluminum is.
I talk to her in the kitchen, too. Yesterday, I made her Autumn Plum Cake (Pflaumekeuchen) (you can get the recipe by typing that into the search box, it’s a great, easy recipe for an Alsatian kind of torte) only I used fresh cherries, and it turned out really juicy. She just laughed (in my head) and told me not to try it with blueberries, that they are a real mess. But she never really liked blueberries.
I have some strange beliefs, including the veil between life and death being a lot thinner than we know. The last message my Mother left on my phone was about some masks I made and sent; she was excited for them to arrive, but that night she fell ill and went to the hospital. She never got to see the masks.
Mind Your Own Business!
This message from yesterday’s Lectionary Readings made me laugh because different cultures have such differences, even in my own country, the United States of America.
I grew up in the great Pacific Northwest, on an island in Alaska, surrounded by Scandinavian immigrants and Alaskan natives and pioneers from the “lower 48,” as we called the USA, which was then a territory and not yet a state. Neighbors relied on one another, and we were strongly interconnected, helping one another out in daily interactions, and in emergencies. We were close, and yet we were also insular – a curious child’s innocent inquiry (mine!) would be met with “Mind your own business.” It meant don’t ask questions. Give people their privacy. In truth, there were many people who had left the “lower 48” for good reasons, established new lives in the last frontier and did not want to be reminded of what kind of mess they might have left behind.
AdventureMan grew up in the deep South, a town of around 3,000 people where they joked that the population always remains the same – a new baby gets born, and a man leaves town.” When I come back from a meeting or a lunch with a friend, he has endless questions. When he meets my friends, he has questions. I tell him generalities, and he asks specifics, and I say something vague. I hurt his feelings when I don’t share all the details – in his culture, in his small town, everyone knew everything about everybody. No one had any secrets. People knew what you had done 50 years ago, and there was little room for changing anyones opinion of who you are now, how you might have changed. People regularly shared what they knew about one another.
We’ve been married decades, and we still push and pull on this issue – how much do we share? We both know there is not a right or wrong, just what feels right to him and what feels right to me, and we have to agree to disagree, and sometimes we can be very disagreeable!
This is what the Lectionary reading says:
Thessaalonians 4:10
But we urge you, beloved,* to do so more and more, 11to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we directed you, 12so that you may behave properly towards outsiders and be dependent on no one.
How does it work for you?
Give to Those Who Ask
Yesterday’s Lectionary readings were rich with wise instructions for navigating complicated situations.
First in Doha, then in Kuwait, and now, too, in Pensacola, we encounter beggers. In Doha, it could be women with babies, kicked out of their homes, or a begger in the middle of the street with a transfusion bag full of blood with an introvenous feed tube, begging for enough money to have the operation he needed for his kidneys (I later learned they were fake). In Kuwait, we had beggers who knew us, and who waited outside our favorite restaurants and we would give them our take-away boxes. In Pensacola, it is the homeless, often military veterans with mental health issues, families without homes, elderly men and women abandoned by the side of the road.
Many treat these people with scorn, insisting they are living like kings on what they scrounge from gullible givers. Some act with compassion, passing out bottles of water and fresh made sandwiches, or passing small bills to those at the corners. Discussion varies little about the “problem;” what is the right thing to do?
Living in the Middle East, I was the recipient myself of kind charity, stuck by the side of the road with a broken car, being given bottles of cold water while a kind stranger changed my flat tire, or a neighbor brought me a platter of leg of lamb and mensaf on an Eid holiday. People invited us into their homes and families. People were kind as I struggled to find words, and helped me understand customs which were strange to me. Charity comes with many faces.
If we are who we claim to be – People of the Book, believers – the answer is clear in this reading from Matthew:
Matthew 5:38-48
38 ‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” 39But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; 40and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; 41and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. 42Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
43 ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? 47And if you greet only your brothers and sisters,* what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
The Things That Matter
Moving to Kuwait was huge, with so many adjustments. As we hunted for a house, we were shown palatial living spaces. One had a big pool as you entered the house – inside the house. One house had an elevator to the three floors. We were shown so many truly amazing places to live.
It was just me, AdventureMan, and our cat named Pete. My husband worked hard. Those houses were just too big for me, and the quieter life I wanted to live, and how would I find Pete hidden in one of those huge houses?
We chose an apartment high on the 10th floor in Fintas, overlooking a beach park, overlooking a wild street, with a 180 degree view of the Arabian/Persian Gulf. There really was never a question. That view took my breath away, and gave me hours of pleasure, watching dhows, watching fishermen, watching people in the park. I called it my Eyrie.
It also gave me a glorious daily sunrise. Every sunrise was different and glorious.
Later, we were able to buy exactly the house I wanted in Pensacola – a house we had owned before, with a view of the Bayou. As a great favor to me, AdventureMan, who never wanted to move again, agreed to move, and together we watch the sun set over the Bayou. Every night we have a sunset. Every night, a different sunset, a different angle, a different color, a different mood. I am grateful for the richness that fills my life every evening when we watch the sun set, and my heart fills with awe.
Stranger in a Strange Land: High School
Today’s writing prompt is irresistible: Something you learned in High School.
I left my US High School mid-year to live in Germany, and to go to a US Department of Defense High School.
I learned that not everyone thinks the same way I think.
I learned that sometimes the way I think might even be wrong, or incomplete.
I learned that even within our own culture, there may be varieties of cultures and many different ways to do a thing, and that none is truly the “right” way, that there may be many right ways.
I learned to lean back and observe, before I ventured an opinion.
I learned to listen when someone said I was wrong. I didn’t have to agree, but it helped to get this other perspective (no matter how mistaken it might have been, LOL)
After high school, I lived a nomadic life, back and forth to university, then marrying a military man and being on the move for the next forty years. Some of my best friends to this day are friends I made during those high school years, people who have led very different lives, but who still share so much in common because of our uncommon heritage and our diverse views. Learning that kind of flexibility eased the way in later life, living in different cultures in Germany, in Africa and in the Middle East and finally, in the Deep South. I’m still learning! 🙏😄🙏
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