In The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews sang about some of her favorite things: things like, girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, and snowflakes that stayed on her nose like eyelashes. But she forgot to mention anything about autumn, the best time of the year.
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Confession: The title of this blog is misleading. Because once you’ve been diagnosed with wanderlust—that strong desire or urge to travel and explore—there is no cure.
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My husband, Gary, was stubborn tenacious. Diagnosed with late-stage, slow-growing prostate cancer, there was a two-year life expectancy. But Gary stubbornly insisted on living ten years. Ten far-reaching, astonishing years.
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I loved that I was married to a tenacious man.
Armed with a Chai tea and a map of the Fruit Loop, I rambled through beautiful farmland past vineyards and alpaca ranches and warted pumpkins with Mt. Hood standing guard in the near distance.
All photos: Marlys
Today, September 28, is National Good Neighbor Day. This thought from NationalDayCalendar.com:
It is a blessing to have a good neighbor, but it is even a greater thing to BE a good neighbor.
What if we made it our goal to be a good neighbor year-round?
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Today is my husband, Gary’s, birthday. It’s also our wedding anniversary. If cancer had not stolen him from me, we would be celebrating forty-five years of marriage.
In Fredrick Backman’s novella And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, a young boy asks his grandfather a question about his grandmother: “How did you fall in love with her?”
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Speaking from experience, living with less is rather liberating.
When we have too much stuff, then we have to maintain it, and build fences around it, and pay storage fees for it, and we can’t actually park our cars in our garages because of it.
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I remember exactly where I was when my cell phone rang. “It’s cancer,” said the deep voice I knew and loved so well. “Oh, hon,” I said, letting my breath out, my brain firing in all directions like that little silver ball in a pinball machine.
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It’s infinitely more comfortable to wrap the security blanket of my routine around me — with stacks of books and pots of tea nearby — than it is to travel alone without my best friend/tour director/husband.
And so, I booked a cruise to the last frontier as a brave-making venture. Alone.
All photos by Marlys unless otherwise noted
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