Daily Archives: November 8, 2011

Zero to sixty in twenty-one years

Suddenly we’re in high gear. We chose a yacht broker and he’s lining up potential boats. We have two notebooks of lists that get longer each day. We rented a storage locker and we’ve been moving everything that goes on the boat out of the house. We photographed everything else and we’re poised for a Craigslist flood as soon as Thanksgiving is over. Friends ask us where we’ll go the day we close on the house and we shrug and answer, “we don’t know!”

And just like that, the fear of seeing the same view out of every window for the rest of my life is gone and I feel free. It took us way longer to get here than we ever imagined. We started our lives together with crushing debt, made a couple of boneheaded decisions, suffered some family upsets, survived cancer and lost three parents. On the other hand we watched our son grow into a remarkable and talented man, gained a brilliant and beautiful daughter-in-law, had some sailing and cycling adventures, and laughed and cried with our wonderful friends and family year after year.

Through it all we never stopped planning for this day. True, we stopped talking about it for a long time because we felt our friends and family were secretly rolling their eyes whenever we talked boats and sailing and world travel. But we kept at it, putting one foot in front of the other, making even the smallest decisions with an eye toward the future. And here we are, finally, poised on the edge, about to jump.

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