Imagine That

On Jason's second birthday, I stood at the upstairs bathroom window and watched spring perform its magic in the barnyard and fields that surrounded our home. I opened the window to welcome the warm breeze and smell the freshly-plowed ground.  A row of red and yellow tulips lined up perfectly along a single rusty barbed wire that separated the barnyard from the field, and a dozen chickens pecked at the soft ground below me.

We had made it through another brutal winter in a house that was a hundred years old and broken down.  The cracks in the exterior walls were so big, snow would often times find its way inside.  When J.J. was home, he would keep the wood-burning stove red hot (an ability I never mastered), but during his absences, Jason and I were unbearably cold and rarely took off our coats.  With spring's arrival, hope returned, along with a resolve to "just hold on; all would be well."  

As I stood in the window and watched J.J. on his big red tractor planting soybeans in the back forty,  I thought about how much I loved my life, my husband, son and two step-daughters, Amy and Stacia, and, at that moment, I couldn't imagine life anywhere else but on the farm.

When Jason turned five, his memories of the farm had all but faded.  He was a city boy now and living in a house that was built in a day in a neighborhood that was built in a week.  The backyard could be mowed in five minutes, and if the next-door-neighbor fell out of bed, every house on the block shook.  J.J. was an every-other-weekend dad,  I worked full time and went to college part time, and when the babysitter said, "This is too hard. I quit!" my boy became a latch-key kid.  But Jason enjoyed his life on the cul-de-sac with his menagerie of friends and endless activities, and he couldn't imagine living anywhere else.

At the same time Jason was turning double digits, I was drawing up plans to enlarge our house by converting the garage into a "Jason Room." One construction project turned into another and soon I had our little brown house with yellow shutters exactly as I wanted it, and I couldn't imagine ever moving away from the southwest side of Indianapolis and my labor of love.

Some time during Jason's twenty-first year while he was still living in the little house on the cul-de-sac that I had made so comfortable he couldn't ever imagine leaving, ever, I sold the house and moved to Florida. Imagine that!