Living on the View

My new hat...a
nice change!

My husband and I rented a little house when we were first married and the view from every window was absolutely spectacular. My husband was still in college and I was working in a tiny town teaching 4th grade.

The old farm house had an oil stove and walls so thin that the slightest touch would put a hole in the wall paper. There were pine wood floors throughout and the kitchen was designed for a table large enough to feed a big family. It sat on a country gravel road. The river was a short walk away. We lived in the middle of an orchard.

In all ways it was the perfect "house". My mother absolutely loved it. She was sitting with us in the front yard under the giant tree drinking coffee one morning when she began talking about all those things that made the old house perfect...the view, the orchard, the river and of course, that big kitchen with room for lots of children.

That was when my quiet father said "But, Agnes, they cannot live on the view."

See the thing was, the place was perfect but I thought it was in the wrong place! I agreed with my father. I didn't think we could make a living so we could support our family. Yet, my husband who is not connected with places nearly as much as I am was willing to stay and make it work for us somehow. He could hunt and fish, coach football and teach. It was perfect for him.

I often wonder if my ambition was actually his too. Or were we so connected that what I wanted and what he wanted were somehow the same. Oh, and we did move to a bigger town and my husband worked in that school system for a majority of his working career.

I often wonder what our life would have been like if I had been more content with what we had and had not always been looking over the fence at the adventure around the corner.

The view from my back patio here in the RV Resort.

So life goes on. We are getting ready to move to a new location here in Tucson, Arizona. We have always lived the six months we spend here in a very temporary way. Our park model is very nice and I love it but our needs and wants have changed as we age.

We have found a different place in a town house located near walking trails and just across from the pool of the townhouse complex. It is just down-at-the-ears enough to suit us. What keeps us going is the projects and change.

We will keep our friends here in the park because we are not going that far. We will keep our golfing world because the new location is closer to that place. We will keep so many things.

But the view...well that will not be the same. Our beautiful mountains that we see from two sides will not be there. As we grow older, I keep remembering what my father said. He was so right...living on the view is not enough.

Have a wonderful day.

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