Out of the Garden

We had worked our whole lives to build the dream that my husband and I had set before us when we married, that house on the river was like a carrot dangling before our very noses and for almost 20 years we scrimped and saved and put off luxuries and trips to buy our 11 acres of paradise. Once we got into our remote panacea of heaven on earth we made a startling discovery…we were too damn old to enjoy it.

Oh it is one thing to occasionally enjoy the vista that enfolds when we step out onto our deck, and it is fun to once in a while trot down to the dock and fish, it is even enjoyable to ride up and down the river in the boat on those are occasions that a) the damn thing is running and b) there is gas in it. I guess like most parents, we never thought our kids would leave the nest and then we thought once they did we would have a ton of tow-headed grandchildren running amok over our dream. We idealistically thought that life would continue to move forward within our dream and that our dream would also be our children’s dream. Unfortunately this is not the case.

We were only in our dream home a short while when I was informed that my first grandchild was expected, the problem was my oldest son had settled in Georgia and we live in Alabama - oh well there are always vacations. This was also about the time that my youngest son got out of school and wanted to live in town, go figure, I thought everyone would want to travel a short 13 miles to get to Eden. I was wrong in that assumption as well, so here we were, my husband and myself, like a modern day Adam and Eve living our dream. This lasted for less than a year, when my husband found a lump in his throat that we found to be thyroid cancer.

His surgery and recuperation was not as we expected, his illness had triggered some weird auto-immune disease that when raging as it often did during that period of time rendered him into an almost invalid state. So here I sat on 11 acres on the river quite alone for the first time in almost 20 years of marriage. I started online gaming to fill my time.

I learned that online gaming success was all about speed – computer speed, download speed, upload speed and more importantly internet speed – I exhausted all my avenues to get the fastest possible connection in my remote area in short order and ended up playing via satellite for almost 6 years. As an asinine, somewhat perfectionist type personality this was never good enough, not by a long shot.

When a new medication was discovered that pretty much restored my husband to moderately good health, I took a good long look around our place and realized that although beautiful, this place was not the Eden we had envisioned because we could not share it with our family. We had tragically lost our oldest son and it was evident that our youngest had ideas of his own as to what Eden is.

A lot of my guildmates laugh at me because I rented an apartment in town to get a better internet connection and yes it is quite strange to move backwards from what our original dream was, but that is how life goes. You make plans based on what you have and prepare for the future. Unfortunately you never know what fate has in store for you. You see the world as one way and in the blink of an eye, a roadblock is put up to stop you cold. You have to find an alternate route. You have to weave around the many highways to try to get back where you were. In my case, all the roads were closed to our personal Eden and there is no return, we missed it. I will not sell the place and I still have my office there, but I can’t imagine ever living there again, who knows?

I’m ok with that, there is a coffee shop around the corner from our new apartment and I have an exceptional internet speed, and we are right on the Mardi Gras Parade route. We live in an apartment that is reminiscent of the one we lived in our early years of marriage and it helps us to forget the pains of once living in our dream world paradise.

Be careful what you plan for, the dream that comes true can be the most painful of all - Momologic