Voyaging Without a Home Port

"Together we're in this relation ship,

We built it with care to last the whole trip,

Our true destination's not marked on any chart,

We're navigating for the shores of the heart."

--John Duhan

Copyright © 2018

by Ralph F. Couey

This situation, technically speaking, might be described as "on the brink."  It's Saturday, and we leave Tuesday, not for vacation, but quite possibly forever.  We go to Maryland for two weeks of delightful grandparent duty.  We do come back to Colorado after that, but only for about 16 hours, a "cup o' coffee" in the old baseball parlance.  After that pause, we board another jet bound for Hawai'i and the next chapter of our lives.  

Of course we've been there.  Cheryl is a bona fide Kama'aina, and we lived there for five years of Navy duty.  Plus, we've been back for visits more times than we could accurately enumerate.  But this time feels different, very much like being between two doors, one closing, and the other opening.

We haven't really been in Colorado all that long, having actually lived here for 12 out of the 20 months since I retired.  Still, it's been a good stay.  We've been with family, two daughters and their families, two grandkids, two granddogs, and one grandkitty.  We found a church home that is very hard to say goodbye to.  And as the time winds down, I am sorta vexed by the thoughts of all the things I wanted to do here, but somehow never got done.  There was always tomorrow, until I ran out of tomorrows.

The past month has been an uphill slog of divestiture of furniture and possessions, paring down to a jam-packed small storage unit, a closet at our daughter's home, and whatever we'll (try to) get on the plane.  While emotionally and physically taxing, it has also been cathartic.  We've almost completely freed ourselves of the chains of furniture and housewares (yes, almost), saying goodbye to things we've been hauling around for over 35 years.  You could possibly stretch the play-doh far enough to call us vagabonds.

Our stay in Hawai'i is indeterminate.  Maybe one year, perhaps four, dependent on Cheryl's tolerance of Army Medical Corps bureaucracy, and her mother's tolerance of us in her house.  At the end of that stretch we will have a decision to make, one the resolution of which has thus far eluded us:  Where to retire.

"Home" has a different meaning for us, the result of a lifetime seemingly spent packing and unpacking boxes.  Home for me now is what I describe as "wherever the motorcycle's parked" even though I am currently sans bike.  Hawai'i will always be home to Cheryl emotionally.  She was born there, grew up there, and is where most of her immediate family still lives, including her 91-year-old energizer bunny of a mom.  But we can't afford to retire there, without either a big lottery win, or voluntarily immersing ourselves in abject poverty.  No thanks.  Besides, as she frequently says, "we've already been there."

Our criteria for picking a retirement location is complex.  It has to be affordable.  It has to be tax-friendly to retirees.  The climate needs to be reasonably temperate, somewhere between Arizona summers and Colorado winters.  Good medical care is necessary.  We aren't young anymore.  It needs to be a "happening place" with plenty to do and see, and close to an international airport where we can easily travel from, and be easily traveled to (9 grandkids, ya know).  For us, retirement will not be about sitting around waiting to die.  It has to be safe.  While we support the letter and spirit of Amendment No. 2, we've never lived in a place where we felt compelled to pack heat, and we really don't want to start.  Now, we enjoy our times at the gun range shooting other people's weapons, but having one or two in the house just to feel safe?  Don't think so.

Does such a place exist?  Or are we chasing a mystical chimera?  I've been told that there are such places overseas, but as hateful and angry as things are politically in the United States, we're not ready to turn our backs on our homeland.

Not yet, anyway.

In the end, our choice will be a compromise, what we're willing to concede to the inevitable hard realities.

I don't think there are too many of us who haven't conducted that mind experiment that poses the hypothesis "What if we won the lottery?"  It's part and parcel of our willingness to indulge dreams, even the silly ones.  As we've batted that around between us, the consensus is that we would own several homes in several places and rotate between them, leaving when we are summoned by the seductive call of the open road.  And yes, we've considered the RV thing.

But it's altogether possible that we'll continue on, rootless and unencumbered by debt or possessions (well, mostly anyway) until the inexorable march of time and senescence forces us either into the prison of assisted living, or the end of our mortal existence.  I, for one wouldn't be sad if my last words in this life would be, "Where shall we go next?"

But that choice is not yet upon us.  Right now, life is still about the journey, and the undiscovered adventure that lies just beyond the horizon.  Life is an ocean, love is a boat, and our voyage remains incomplete.