Chapter 11: Final Retirement

CHAPTER 11: FINAL RETIREMENT

When we returned from New Zealand and sold our shell of a home in New Orleans, we started half-heartedly looking for another overseas job. There were age restrictions for visas. We didn’t fancy going into the US test-driven madness; so, in June of 2012 at the age of fifty-nine we tried retirement.

In March of 2020 the Corona virus swept the world. This chapter  is about the last eight years. As I am in the high risk group, who knows if there will be a last chapter. 

Six months before Katrina hit I finally hung on the walls of our house in New Orleans  artwork by an Ecuadorian artist I had become friends with over  twenty years earlier. In 1985 I was teaching middle school science at Academia Cotopaxi in Quito. My mother had returned to university for a degree in art history. She had become interested in Haitian primitive art and asked if Ecuador had a primitive art style. They did. The artists could often be seen walking the tourist areas of Quito trying to sell their brightly colored paintings of festivals and everyday life.. 

In a small handicraft shop a block off a tourist thoroughfare in Quito I had seen paintings by the artist I thought was the best, Julio Toaquiza. I asked the shop owner, Maria Presentacion, where Julio lived. She took a large painting off the wall. It was a painting of market day in the town of Zumbahua. Maria said she thought he lived in Zumbahua.

Early on a bright sunny Saturday in June, I set off to find Julio. My wife at the time and one year old son came with me for the first part of the trek. After the four hour bus journey from Quito to Latacunga to Pujili we were at the end of regular bus service. I left wife #2 and one year old son in a hotel in PuJili and started hitching to Zumbahua. This was not unusual in Ecuador. Many people would pick you up. They would usually expect to be paid.

Saturday was market day in Zumbahua. By the time I arrived everyone was finishing packing up their wares. A group of men who were sharing a bottle of aguardiente asked what I was looking for. I replied, “The artist, Julio Toaquiza.”

One of the men replied, “I am Julio Toaquiza.” 

He led me through the back alleys of Zumbahua and up a flight of stairs to his small one room apartment. He took a small primitive painting off the wall and proudly handed it to me. He was definitely not the Julio Toaquiza I was looking for. This process repeated itself two more times before I decided I wasn’t going to find Julio and needed to get back to Pujili before rapidly approaching night. 

I stuck my thumb out and soon a small truck stopped. The cab was full of people and there were already six people in the truck bed. Before getting in the truck bed I asked the driver if he knew where Julio Toaquiza lived. He said he did. After twenty minutes winding through the dusty Andean road the driver stopped. He leaned out his window and pointed to a cottage about two hundred meters up the mountain. He said Julio lived up there. I had come this far. With the sun about to slide behind the western range of the magnificent Andes, I climbed out of the truck. I handed over some Sucres to the driver and dubiously climbed toward the cottage and a meeting with destiny. 

Through a tiny window in the sod wall of the thatched cottage, I could see someone hunched over a  painting. This was the Julio Toaquiza I had been searching for. I would later learn that he was the first indigenous artist to move an art form that had been developed over centuries for decorating ceremonial drums to paintings on rectangular frames. Julio and I became friends over the next year. He would stay with us when he made his monthly trip to Quito to sell his art. I would get first pick of his monthly output.  I was invited to and attended his oldest son’s wedding, an amazing multi-day experience. Before I left Ecuador in 1986 I made a last visit to Tigua to see Julio and his wife, Francisca. They had just had another child. Julio asked if I would be his new son’s godfather. I refused using the excuse that we were leaving the country soon. 

Almost 30 years later I was about to start settling into my final retirement. I recalled all the artwork I had lost in the storm. I googled Julio and found an article by one of Julio’s sons, Gustavo. The article seemed to be describing a memorial for Julio. There was an email contact for Gustavo. I wrote expressing my sadness at the news of Julio’s death. I went on to explain that I had always had the sense that Julio and I would meet again.

Gustavo wrote back sending his greetings and greetings from Julio and Francisca. They were both alive and well. An earthquake had destroyed their home in the 1990s, but they still lived in Tigua. They now had a house and a gallery right on the side of the road. Carolyn and I began to plan a trip.

The trip included a two week stay in the beach town of Canoa. With the global embrace of email and social media we were able to follow Moya’s connection with the founding of a school in the Ecuadorian village. Over thirty years earlier Moya and I had spent a few nights in Canoa. We negotiated with a local for a room in their house. Our room came with shared use of the outhouse which was on the other side of a small yard occupied by chickens and a pig. We spent a couple days enjoying the beach which we shared with no one.

 Canoa was now an international surfing destination with over sixty registered guest accommodations. Carolyn and I had a cabin at Phil’s Hotel Baloo. I had known Phil decades earlier when he was trying his hand at the emerging Ecuadorian shrimp farming industry. We spent two weeks in Canoa. In the morning we volunteered at Moya’s school. We ran a little science fair for a couple classes. After a three dollar lunch of soup, fresh fish with potato of some kind, juice, and desert we wandered back to our sandy, hot cabin, and tried to nap or prepare for the next day. 

Our old lives, where we were comfortable with our identities as people giving back through our professions, were gone. This was new. We were trying to hold on to our feeling of giving back while trying to work out a secure, enriching retirement. The Canoa experience began to clarify what we were willing to endure. The questions began to float into our consciousness of who were we now that we weren’t teachers. Our identities were being rebuilt. Would we still be the right person for each other now that we weren’t the professional educators we had known?

The science fair ended with a little school celebration. Carolyn went to bed early. Moya and I went out for a night of celebration and farewell. During our rum fueled tour through the beach bars of Canoa, we bored every bartender with the story of our relationship that would have ended very differently if email had evolved in Ecuador and Africa six months faster than it did. Some time well past when good sense is usually long gone, a foggy realization crept into our drunk heads that we were where we wanted to be, living the lives we were destined to live. Our love that was entering its fourth decade would endure as a friendship that wanted the greatest peace and happiness for each other. Carolyn was my peace and source of greatest happiness.

Before sunrise Carolyn and I left our cottage on the Pacific Ocean. Twelve hours later we were two miles high nestled in the valley between the twin ranges of the Andes Mountains in the town of Latacunga. The bus ride up the mountains had been spectacular and at times frightening. There were thousand foot sheer drop-offs. Buses would pass each other on the narrow two lane highway with horns blaring. Carolyn seemed a little pale after the journey. When we were about to go to bed, she passed out. She was breathing, but unconscious. 

There was no phone in the room. I didn’t want to leave her alone. What to do? Was it altitude sickness? Had she not adjusted to the ten thousand foot change ? Was there permanent damage being done?  I panicked for what seemed like an hour, but was really only a couple minutes. Carolyn opened her eyes. She smiled and wondered where she was, and then it all came back to her. She was fine.

The next  day we met Julio’s daughter, Magdalena, and went to the market town of Saquisili. There was going to be a celebration. Julio and I were renewing our friendship after thirty years.

While we wandered the handicraft market in Saquisili, Julio’s sixty seven year old wife Francisca, went to buy a sheep for the party. Minutes before the bus left, Francisca trots up to the door carrying a large wooly beast. Soon we would sit around their dirt floor kitchen as the wooly beast’s throat was cut, and the blood was collected for soup. The carcass was then hung up and skinned by Francisca’s father while dogs licked blood out of the dust.

Francisca and Julio had given us their room for the night. After dinner of cuy (guinea pig) and sheep blood soup, the drinking and dancing began. Julio’s children are multi-talented artists. Many are musicians as well as painters. Julio plays an Andean flute and drum. We drank and danced until we were about to drop, but we didn’t feel like we could go to bed before Julio and Francisca. My God, Francisca had been up before us and carried a mighty big sheep home. At midnight Julio and Francisca said they were tired. We took the opportunity to say goodnight and crawl under the mound of blankets that just about kept out the rarefied Andean chill. The music still throbbed through the walls, but we were so tired it was like a lullaby.

Around 2 a.m. both Carlyn and I woke up. All the beverages we had been consuming were now pressing to return to the outside world. When the bus dropped us off earlier, Magdalena had given us a tour of the neighborhood. About fifty yards down the road from Julio’s house and gallery was the community toilet. They did not have their own toilet. When we could wait no longer, we pulled on pants and sweaters and hats and boots and coats. We pushed on the door to leave the cold room to dash fifty yards down the road. The door was locked from the outside. The music was still blaring, so nobody could hear us screaming. We looked around for a bucket. Nothing. A cup, a hole in the wall ... nothing. We were contemplating where was the best place to pee on the floor when the song stopped. We yelled like crazed Andean wolves howling at a full moon.

The party rushed to the door to free us. They explained they were worried someone might come in off the road and rob us. We briefly stared at the small crowd of smiling faces before hustling down the dark road to the rarely cleaned public toilet. The music was once again filling the Andean countryside as we pulled our alpaca sweaters tight around us and strolled hand in hand back to our room.

The next morning we were the first ones up. We didn’t hear what time the music stopped, but we would have someone tell us later that they danced until five. As we were watching the llamas in the yard, Julio’s grandkids, Danny and Evelin, came out of where they had been sleeping. Danny was six at the time. We had been playing bullfight during the party. I took one of Julio’s bull masks off the wall and played the bull while Danny played the matador for a good part of the evening. Now Danny wanted to know if Carolyn and I would be his and Evelin’s god parents. Their large brown eyes pleaded with us to relieve them from the stigma of not being baptized. We stumbled over excuses about not being in Ecuador very long. They got us to agree to consider it if we came back.

A year later we were back in Ecuador. Our fledgling handicraft business was in its second year. Julio’s daughter, Magdalena, had spent several weeks with us in the fall. We painted together in a plein aire art contest, did painting demonstrations in stores and libraries, and searched for a market interested in the artwork of Tigua. That market never materialized, but we discovered what we thought would be the product that could finance our handicraft business, tagua jewelry. Over the next eight years the jewelry made from the nut of a palm tree would pay for our annual trip to Ecuador. 

The baptism process began with getting Danny and Evelin the clothes and shoes they needed for the ceremony. We visited the priest who had us condemn our souls to Catholic hell by lying that we would raise the children in the Catholic Church if it should ever fall to us to raise them. Their real parents weren’t raising them in the Catholic Church! We handed over fifty dollars to the priest and proceeded to get the food and drink for the post-baptismal celebrations.

At the party after the baptism, Julio asked if I would be god parent to another of his grandkids. I said I wasn’t going to lie to a priest in a church again. That ended that. I tried to understand why was the baptism thing so important for an indigenous community that placed more faith in the beliefs of their ancestors than in Christianity. It could not have been just to get a new suit of clothes and a party. As I talked to people, the idea emerged that it meant you existed. The Catholic Church had a record that you were alive and baptized. The municipal government was not trusted as much as the church to maintain the record.

Our retired life developed a series of seasonal activities.  After finishing graduate studies in Hattiesburg in 1989, I had taken a job teaching third grade in the migrant farmworker community of Immokalee, Florida. This experience established my tie to southwest Florida and led to the purchase of a five acre mango orchard. The orchard became a jungle over the years I was working overseas. Now that I was retired the southwest Florida dry season (November to May) was devoted to orchard recovery, and rainy season was mango harvesting. 

Most of dry season was, also, snowbird season. Snowbirds were the market for our Ecuadorian jewelry. The first year of our handicraft business we explored markets and observed jewelry was much more popular than naïf art. Our business evolved into an annual three week trip to Ecuador to shop and to avoid a little of the southwest Florida heat and hurricane season. Around Christmas we would start the early morning routine of hauling tent, tables, and merchandise to markets. Over the course of the first couple years Carolyn took over most of the markets. We found that I tended to inhibit buyers. Carolyn said I was too eager. 

Through mango sales I developed a relationship with a fruit tree nursery and produce stand close to the orchard, Fruitscapes. During snowbird season I began setting up a table at Fruitscapes on Saturdays. Our biggest one day event was the Pine Island Garden Club Gala in late February. After that Carolyn would start passing jewelry that she didn’t think would sell to me. I became the outlet store for our business. There wasn’t much money in this picked over jewelry, but for me it beat fishing.

The careers that had defined our lives and us were gone. The first year I wasn’t teaching I felt each day that used to have so much emotion attached: the first day of school, the beginning of school holidays, and the last day before summer holiday. By the second year the education career withdrawals were gone. We pottered along in our gig economy approach to filling in the years before we could claim those financially  liberating benefits of  Medicare and social security and our pensions.

Our identities were changing. Our relationship to each other was changing, and I wasn’t paying attention. I would leave early to work in the orchard, and Carolyn would piddle around the trailer. We had left lifetime careers which organized our existence and kept us on the positive side of making a constructive contribution to the world. Now we were trying to find a way to fill the indefinite number of days we had left. We were spending more time physically together but drifting emotionally apart. The abyss of despair was looming in our future.

Our gig jobs and hobbies began to fill up our lives. When I lived in Caracas in the 1990s, the drama department of the school put on a faculty play each year to raise money for a local charity. The experience reminded me of the feelings of teamwork and community that I enjoyed playing rugby and other team sports. One evening while we were enjoying time at the beach cottage before our next tenants arrived and sent us back to our trailer in September Estates, I saw an ad in the island’s free paper about auditions for a community theater production. Auditions were taking place across the street. What the heck? I put down my mango daiquiri, put on my Crocs,  and strolled across the street to the real estate office where auditions were taking place. 

When I walked in, I saw several women sitting on chairs waiting their turn. A head popped out of the conference room where auditions were taking place. The head smiled and slid back into the conference room. I heard a voice say,”It’s a man!”

The audition in progress quickly ended. Laurie, the playwright,  came out, looked at me, looked at the line of women, and called me next. I got a part. The play was a murder mystery that we performed in a conference room at a Holiday Inn. The audience had lunch before the play. The cast waited in a liquor storage closet until the dishes were cleared. We avoided the temptation to reduce tension by partaking of some of what surrounded us. As I enjoyed the cast’s nervous camaraderie before our entrance, I recalled some rugby experiences. No rugby team I ever played with would have been able to resist the temptations surrounding waiting for half an hour in a liquor closet before a match. Every performance sold out. We got paid. It wasn’t a lot, but my ego didn’t care. I was a paid actor.  Soon I would be playing Jacob Marley in two different productions of a Christmas Carol.

When Carolyn and I lived in Honduras we bought the movie “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.” If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s premise is that five people have a significant impact on your life and you meet them again when you arrive in heaven. The idea is fun. This memoir has been full of people who have moved my life in a direction which determined what would come next. Glen is someone who serendipitously popped into my life over forty years and is still an influence. 

Glen and I met in the New Orleans French Quarter farmer’s market one late spring day. I would soon be leaving for Guayaquil for my first overseas job. Wally (Chapter 2) and I were selling junk we collected from rugby club members as a fund raiser for the club. Glen was selling sun glasses. In those days the old Desire Street streetcar was parked in the farmer’s market. Wally and I set up next to the streetcar. We used the side of the streetcar for display and as the day passed and our cooler emptied of beers, we took more and more delight in crying out, “Stella!!!” to the girls who walked by. Glen was amused by our antics and happy to share a beer or two. It started to rain. We had some water guns for sale. They were loaded to demonstrate they were functional. As the afternoon thunderstorm soaked us and our merchandise and other vendors covered their stuff and headed for cover, Wally and I picked up the water guns  and launched all out water gun war against each other as the downpour drenched us and everything around us. This antic endeared us to Glen and the relationship has endured.

Glen and I have talked about fate and destiny and the idea of the movie, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Glen has certainly influenced my life. I would not be living where I am if I didn’t know Glen. I asked her once why she moved to New Orleans.

She answered, “Richard Burton.”

She was living in Oklahoma when she saw Richard Burton on the Dick Cavett Show promoting his tour of Camelot. She was star struck. New Orleans would be the nearest performance. She loaded her sunglass business into her van and headed to the Big Easy.  Richard Burton would play a part in where I live today.

When I finished graduate work in Hattiesburg, wife #2 and I were looking for a place to move. Wife #2 wanted to move where she knew someone. She and Glen had become friends when we lived in New Orleans the year before our son was born. I got a job offer in Immokalee. Glen had moved to Ft. Myers Beach a couple years earlier. I could commute to Immokalee from there, so we moved to southwest Florida. After my final retirement I was volunteering at a nature preserve on the island where the town of Ft Myers Beach was located. The preserve had an annual fundraising event where groups of people were led through the preserve. At various stops along the paths skits were performed about the history of the island. Glen and I wrote and performed several times over the day a skit about Ponce de Leon’s battle with the Calusa Indians. We used some historical fiction liberties to describe a possible scene after the factual shooting of DeLeon. I added a subplot about the release of European pigs into the New World. Glen played deLeon. I played the bumbling ship’s cook who let’s all the pigs loose, spills all the rum, and breaks deLeon’s favorite mug. We performed the skits for a few years before the preserve stopped the event.

Retirement life was settling into making ourselves open and ready for experiences. More important was to give of our time and talents (as they were) than money which was budgeted. The trips to Ecuador were self-financing and began to have a routine. We became part of the lives of the families who made the jewelry we sold. We were busy, and I thought we were happy. I would go off happily to the orchard most days looking forward to the exercise and fresh air. Comfortable in the thought that I would be doing no harm. A mango tree or two would be saved from the onslaught of tropical invasive plants. Our identities had changed and our relationship teetered on an abyss..

By January of 2015 our life style was not working. We still had two years until Medicare and my social security. Carolyn was getting a small British pension. My great grandfather’s legacy passed down through generations and various stock incantations was $3000 a month after taxes. I was making a little money selling real estate. Carolyn and I were spending a lot of time cleaning the beach cottage for the next renters. Arguments were springing up over if we needed to wash windows and other goofy stuff. It was not fun. European tourists discovered Ft. Myers Beach, and the cottage was booked in the summer. We were sweltering in a tin box in the middle of a deserted senior citizen mobile home park next to a mosquito infested mangrove wetland for an extra $500 a week when we didn’t know what we wanted to spend the money on except maybe to be at a nice cottage on the beach. We decided to sell the tin box trailer and move to the beach full time. 

No longer would our identities include being vacation home owners and caretakers. We were going to embrace the dream. We were going to be full-time retired in the cottage we had bought fifteen years earlier for the purpose of retiring to it one day. Before we could do this; though, we had some rental obligations to honor. 

We put our tin box on the market. I was the real estate agent. Our thinking was it would take at least ninety days for us to get our price and the deal to close. That would just cover the last booking we had for our beach cottage. On the afternoon of the first open house a couple who had an RV in the RV Park next door to September Estates said they would sign that day at our asking price for cash if they could close in 30 days. We signed and figured we would work out where we would live.

Henry is another friend like Glen; except, I have known Henry longer. He is one of those people whose life has interconnected with mine at several significant times over the past half century. Henry and I were in the same fraternity at Tulane. He was the younger brother of my younger brother in the fraternity, and through many of our incarnations in life we remained connected. One of the many examples is when Wife #2 and I tried to start an Ecuadorian handicraft business in the 80’s. I had just gotten a very large order for scarves. Henry was coaching Tulane Rugby. He couldn’t make it one night and asked if I would fill in. I did and in a fluke accident broke my jaw and was not able to fill the scarf order. Our business would flounder and we would move to Florida.

Another example many years later Henry was working for the International School of Louisiana  when Katrina hit. Evacuations scattered everyone. Henry returned to build the handicap accessible ramps that were required to access the classrooms (even though we had no handicapped kids, parents, or staff) after the storm. 

At the time of our housing crisis in 2015. Henry was working in Boston in carpentry and general home improvement. During the winter he came to Florida and spent a few weeks helping us convert a  twelve foot by twelve foot pig hunting stand in the orchard into a solar-powered bedroom area with a separate plywood platform for a tent with stuff we hauled out of our September Estate’s trailer. For five weeks we lived off the grid in our screened room in the canopy of a mango orchard. We collected rainwater for washing and showers. Two solar cells powered a little refrigerator, a few lights, a fan, and charged devices. A rabbit would usually watch while I made my morning visit to the composting toilet. 

Carolyn and I had our mojo back. The simplistic difficulties of this back to basics lifestyle coupled with our impending embrace of moving our retirement life to full time beach living had us once again walking hand in hand into our future.

Once we were back on the beach the bloom fell off the rose fairly quickly. Previously we had enjoyed the beach cottage during our summer vacations. There weren’t many people visiting southwest Florida in the summer. The Europeans hadn’t found it yet. Now we were there in high season. The traffic and the noise and crowds on the beach melted our retirement dream quicker than an ice cube on a globally warmed south Florida summer day. Ft Myers Beach also started what was proposed to be an eight year road project. Construction was going to be ever present for the next eight years of my retirement life. I retreated to the mango orchard. 

Carolyn had taken a job working two or three days a week at a local gift store. On Monday she would drive me out to the orchard. She would spend the night with me in what we called the treehouse. Tuesday she would go back to the beach and come pick me up on Friday. Some weeks she would come out to spend another night with me during the week. The retirement plan was changing. Dreams of spending days windsurfing, riding my bike on the beach, and  planning my next rugby journalist experience from the comfort of a hammock between two palm trees had vanished. The beach lifestyle was noisy and busy. Ft Myers Beach was no longer the quiet sleepy almost forgotten corner of the Gulf Coast.

When we left the trailer in September Estates,  Carolyn told me where she would like to live on Pine Island if we ever moved back, but we weren’t going to think about returning until we gave beach life two years. After less than a month on the beach, I put a search on the real estate listing service for Carolyn’s dream location back on Pine Island.

Carolyn’s father was not doing well. We planned a trip to England. It would be the last time I saw Roland alive. Ten days before the trip a house popped up on Carolyn’s dream street. It was an old farm house with several acres and lots of fruit trees. It had a pond and a large chicken coop. We arranged to see it and before we finished driving up the driveway we knew we were going to make an offer. The offer was accepted. Our financial juggling started, and we prepared to move again. 

We were optimistic this would be our last move before the old folks home, but we had felt that about the beach cottage. The beach had changed, and we had changed. We, also, knew that change is inevitable, and no matter what we thought we had taken control of in our life, forces way beyond our control could wipe out the best laid plans in an instance.

A year after buying what had quickly become one of our best decisions ever, we planned a summer trip to Denver to visit our old snow-bird neighbors from the beach. The trip was planned to coincide with a rugby old boys tournament in Aspen. I was going to reunite with people I had played with in New Orleans decades earlier. But it was not meant to be. 

A week before the trip Hurricane Irma was taking aim at southwest Florida. Our flights had been booked months earlier. There was nothing special about the date we were leaving. We called Delta and asked if they could move our flight. Delta moved us to a flight a day earlier.

Our old house came with a stock of plywood stored underneath for window protection during a hurricane. As we started pulling it out we realized the pieces didn’t fit any particular window. We threw up pieces that seemed to best cover a window, emptied the refrigerator and freezer, and with bags packed we went to sleep planning to leave for the airport around eleven the next morning. At seven thirty we got a text message saying our flight was cancelled. Twenty minutes later we got a Delta agent who said we could get on a flight at eight. We couldn’t have gotten to the flight if we were in the terminal. 

We started filling bathtubs. Mattresses were pulled to an interior hallway. I went to the orchard and hauled solar cells and batteries back to our house. A first aid kit was put together. Carolyn was trained in how to make a tourniquet. The rest of the plywood was pulled out and cut to fit the gaps. As the wind started to roar, we felt nervous but as ready as we could be. When the power went out, we hooked the tv to the batteries and watched the storm bare down on us. The eye was veering off to the east putting us slightly to the good side of Irma. Exhausted we crawled into our mattress cave and kissed for what we thought could possibly be the last time.

The dawn found us safe in each others’ arms. We crawled out of our mattress cave. The back door was blocked by mounds of debris. Less than a hundred yards from the house a tornado had ripped two large mango trees apart tossing one across our driveway.  We would end up without electricity for ten days. Yard trash covered the yard. The daily search for ice began. 

 When Carolyn came back from her father’s funeral the year before she brought some of his ashes. She had sprinkled them on a white rose bush she planted outside the front door of our new home. The white rose bush brought a little bit of Yorkshire to our Florida home, but the bush had struggled to produce a blossom. When our eyes adjusted to the world outside our plywood encrusted home the morning after Irma, we saw the rose. A beautiful white rose was on a bush that had never produced a flower before. There are possibly several explanations for how this happened, but we will always be convinced it was a sign that Carolyn’s dad was looking out for us.

For the ten days we lived without electricity the solar panels ran a fan at night. The fan rotated between us providing a brief brushing of moving air relief from stagnant south Florida late summer heat. The solar panels kept our devices charged, provided some power for lights, and a few days into the post-hurricane experience we found our internet line was still in tact. We also realized we seemed to be at our best in abnormal circumstances. Something about unexpected experiences that required unusual efforts to adapt seemed to pull us closer together. For almost forty years we had been moving every few years. Change had become part of who we were. Now we were settling in for our final chapter. Without change could Carolyn and I hold together?

 The old house  and grounds became our cause. It had history. A friend of the original owner had been a gardener for Thomas Edison. Scattered around the yard were unique trees from around the world. The coop was filling with chickens. A friend set-up an aquaponic system in a large boat barn on the property. We bought goats and converted half the chicken coop into a goat house. A niece inspired us to try  vegetarianism. Gradually we embraced the food and a way of life which seemed kinder to us and to the world.

My last year in Honduras a student asked what I thought of the end of the world being imminent because a Mayan calendar ended December 21,  2012. A survey of the class found it was a general concern among the group of seventh graders, or they were just being thirteen year olds who wanted to use “Why should I study? The world will be gone in two years”, to justify their lack of motivation.

 It was 2010. I created a unit on the ways the world could end. Each way was assigned to a team of students to research and develop a presentation to present to the class. I was a little concerned this would increase anxiety, but the opposite happened. Students became relaxed about the world ending as they explored and saw the multitude of ways the planet could vanish. It was as if once they saw all the ways that had existed since time began that the earth could end, they were fine with the uncertainty. I was more unsettled, though. Was I ready for the end of the world?

Final retirement almost unconsciously became a slow approach to being able to raise our own food. As the Corona virus was sneaking into our country a raccoon chewed through the roof of the chicken coop and killed five of our nine chickens. The other four would no longer return to the coop at night. Every day or so there was one chicken less and a little pile of feathers somewhere in the yard. In less than two weeks we went from giving eggs away to not being able to find a half dozen at the grocery store. My war on the local raccoon world began as the world was going to war with a virus. In mid-April we helped our goat, Ghandi, give birth to two kids. We were sheltering in place, but life was changing a lot. We were in our element.