Our journey, Chapter 14: The ring of truth
All of these trips to discover where we want to live has been so exhausting that Natalie and I escaped to Arizona for a couple of weeks.
Okay, before you start throwing things at me, that was tongue-in-cheek. We love this suburb of Phoenix in November and come every year at this time. The days are typically 80-ish and the nights are usually in the 50s, so pool time while the sun shines and fireside chats in the evenings. This trip was booked long before we decided to begin our Caribbean exploration.
Before we left Atlanta last week, we celebrated Scott’s birthday with him. Our daughter, Kari, and her husband, Scott have a condo thirty-one floors above Buckhead. Their views are beautiful. As we were talking on their porch, I was subconsciously playing with my wedding ring - a bad habit I have, when it slipped off my finger. I heard it hit the floor and roll under the porch railing and disappear over edge. I jumped to the railing, looked down and felt my heart sink. It’s funny. I never think much about my ring, beyond that bad habit of playing with it, but it’s loss hit me hard. It’s just a thing, right? Except Natalie selected this thing and put it on my finger fifty years ago. Losing it suddenly made me come face-to-face with how fleeting time is and that no matter how hard we hold on, time will most certainly slip through our fingers. All of which reminded me to work harder to enjoy every moment.
Scott ran downstairs and miraculously found my ring. As you can see from the pic, it was a little worse for wear, having bounced off of concrete at the end of it’s tumble, but I held it with tears in my eyes, glad to have it back.
As Natalie and I were on our way to the airport to come to Phoenix, Kari called. She had taken my ring to her jeweler, who did a quick repair job. Kari wanted me to again have it on my finger for our trip. Pretty neat show of love. I am blessed.
My ring is still a little out of round, just like I am after all of our travels, but I’ll work on getting both into better shape.
We’re heading to the ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao) in early December. I’ll be shocked if we decide one of those is the place. We’ll see. We’re adding St. Martin to our list of “maybes”. Half Dutch and half French, it’s interesting. Very close to St. Kitts and a quick perusal of real estate web sites looked promising.
More to come. In the meantime, hug someone you love before time gets away from you.