You're What?!?!!?

You’re what?!?!

If I am lucky, I am two-thirds of the way through my life.  If I am really lucky, a little less so.  At age sixty there is a lengthy list of things that you should not be contemplating or doing.  Pulling up stakes from the your home of thirty-two years is probably one of them.  Today is day one of that journey and I thought it might be fun for me to write about it and share the experience.  I did this when I had both of my knees replaced two and a half years ago and except for the ones written under the influence of drugs, it was pretty good.  I hope that I can do the same again.

Planting the seed-

While growing up in the Detroit, Michigan area, both Carol and I, independently grew and affinity for the out of doors.  “Up North” was always and attraction as that was where the wilds of Michigan were.  This does not count the “Call of the Wild” museum along I-75, which to my child eyes appeared to be a wondrous place where you could watch deer, elk, bears, and wild turkeys frolic.  After what much have been years of badgering my parents to stop on our yearly sojourns on lake side vacations, I was crushed to find that all of the creatures of the forest contained therein had been killed, stuffed, and placed in believable, but clearly contrived poses around a rather small area.  Ouch.

But the love of “Up North” continued unabated.  We spend some time together there prior to our marriage, with Carol even spending the summer in the shadow of “Mighty Mac,” the Mackinaw Bridge, spanning the straits separating the lower and upper peninsulas.  Quick weekend visits were punctuated with drives through the woods,  camping in the yard of here housing unit, and even an intrepid midnight skinny dip at Wilderness State Park.  But then we got really crazy.

Really crazy was moving to Alaska “for a year” until it “got out of Bob’s system” according to Carol’s mom.  Little did she know that Carol was probably the real driving force to this near 4,000 mile move to the Yupik Eskimo village of Eek.  I shall not dwell there as that is not what this blog is about.  I will say that after a stop in Metlakatla, five years after our arrival in Alaska, we found ourselves in what would become our home for over three decades.  We would have and raise three great children, have wonderful careers in education, and make a few, family-like, friends.  Five years after mine and four years after Carol’s retirement, we decided it was time to once again visit crazy-town and go south to move, “Up North”.

The place was settled in 1989, nearly thirty years ago.  We had been looking for property somewhere in the state or in nearby Canada for a while.  Either our finances did not match up with the property or the property did not match up with our desires.  Finally, while traveling with a skunk-struck pitbull named Ikiq (Ick-yick) I found thirty acres for sale outside of Marquette, Michigan, across M-28 from Lake Superior… the lake it is said, that never gives up her dead.  Inquiries found that the sellers were out of state, has owned the property for some time and we willing to subdivide it into something we could afford.  After loaning myself the money from our retirement accounts, we became the proud owners of ten acres of wooded property in the upper peninsula of Michigan.  We now had land, “Up North”!