Dreams Die in Old Age

 

Much as we might rail about failing abilities in our older age, Father Time seems impervious to listening and keeps marching right along. As I alluded to in other posts, we’ve been giving lots of thoughts to our future and continued ownership of our lake property. Sometimes that was hard to do when we were actually there as the property is so special and magnificent, it sucked us into the sheer joy of  our ownership and the surroundings that are so peaceful, quiet and private. We miss all that when we’re away but more and more some of the impracticalities begin to show themselves.

The burden of maintaining two places has fallen hard on our aging bodies. Our main property has been poorly neglected for three years since the only time frame when we can accomplish stuff at home is the summer window when we’ve been up north. Since we enjoyed a warm Fall Marc was able to mostly complete the shed build but we still haven’t gotten to pressure washing the house and shop and trim paint touchup, nor replacement of our back door and frame which dry rotted from standing snow. Obviously, that now waits until next year.

The travel distance also comes into play—the necessity of returning home weekly to keep up with yard work, mowing, laundry and grocery shopping grows old when it’s a three hour trek each way. Since we don’t want to subject the cats to constant travel, it’s one or the other of us that makes the trip and it was during one such trip when Marc went home that I endured (alone) that horrific PTSD inducing wind storm which destroyed so many trees on our property and had me in fear of my life. 

There are other trivialities: the electric co-op charges a whooping $45/mo. service fee year round before any usage charges; major shopping (Walmart, Menard’s, Home Depot, Petco) is at least an hour to an hour and a half away); our well, while producing just fine, is so filled with iron that without expensive correction in the form of softeners and filtration, is ruining the RV fixtures, is undrinkable, and turns everything pink or yellow. 

The weather there is more severe; winds and winter storms come off the lake and without fail we can count on major deadfall and tree cleanup every year when we return. 

But the real shocker came just yesterday when we received the annual tax statement and found that our taxes increased by a staggering 20%! I suspect that is due to the completion of the shop, but it now really puts future ownership into question given that our home place has also taken a significant leap of 10%. 

We plan to be in contact with the Realtor we purchased from to get a market analysis soon and are leaning towards returning there this summer with the intent of completing a few tasks (staircase handrails, burning of the last of the deadfall and downed trees) and then getting it on the market. If that’s the path we pursue, it would be nice if it would sell in one season but if it doesn’t, its not the end of the world. Many are of the opinion that “but you did ALL that work”—well, yeah, but that sweat equity should be worth money and money cures many woes!

 

I always had dreams of a waterside getaway and fortune smiled on us and allowed for it as an experience of life we got to enjoy for three/four years. I’ll need to be happy with that and realize that options and the world get smaller and smaller as we get older and older. It’s life.

It's Been a Month

 

It’s been a harrowing, ugly month since my sweet boy died and I’ve regretted every moment of it. He truly was my soul cat and I feel as though I’ll never get past his loss. He should still be here; begging food from us and sleeping by my side every night. It’s gotten a little easier but it still shakes me up to remember him dying in my arms. Unlike me, I think the other two cats have come to terms with it so we’re about to make a big change in their lives.

One day when I was working at the shelter and visiting the cats, I came across a newly surrendered four/five month old kitten with a broken leg. He was a little purr machine and so friendly, despite his broken bone jutting out from his hip area and his back right foot dragging. Knowing he’d have quite a time to mend after surgery, I volunteered to foster him during his recovery and to see if he might work out getting along with our other girls. 

He came through surgery ok on Saturday, where they pinned his bones together and there’s a good likelihood we should be able to bring him home soon; maybe Tuesday. We’ll keep him sequestered and quiet for a few days or however long it takes and see how everything goes. We’re excited to help him out and hopeful it gets our mind off our grieving for our sweet Jerry. 

Time is going quickly although it’s been tough for me to get out and try and do anything. I did help out at a Victorian Open House where the owners had their lovely home decorated for Halloween and collected a $3 donation for the shelter for every person who wanted to tour. We had hundreds! We offered sweet treats and there were vendors there as well.

I’ve also been able to continue to put together some of my art work for the upcoming craft faire this coming Saturday where we set up a booth showcasing a puppy or adoptable dog. I’ve got rope baskets, a new kind of lacey basket, bookmarks and earrings to sell and I’ll be donating all proceeds to the shelter. What doesn’t sell, I will turn around and list on the shelter online auction which will occur in February. 

I’ve been working on paper collage bookmarks which have turned out quite well so I’m anxious to see how they go over with the public. I hand paint the background paper I glue collage to, and then also glue momagami paper I’ve made onto the back side. This stuff comes out feeling like suede leather so is very tactile when touched. I use junk mail and cartons for card stock for the stiffness layer. Here’s a few examples:

Marc’s been keeping busy building a new storage shed, despite having said he was done building stuff! He’s not been in any great hurry but it should soon be done. It’s planned to hold all the yard utensils and mower so we can get that stuff moved out of the garage. Speaking of mowers, ours died before we got in the last mowing of the season but I think it’ll be OK until we have a chance to purchase another and start mowing again in May. Once the bad weather is here, he’s talking about starting on building our kitchen island. That is long-awaited so I’m excited for that.

Other than the above, we’ve got no plans at all for the holidays or winter; we’ll just be hunkering down trying to stay warm and making a good home for a new little sweet boy. He's got really big shoes to fill! We can’t save them all, but we try and do our part! 

 

 

 

 

Beloved Jerry (2013-2024)

 

Sometimes there just aren’t adequate words for some events we go through, and losing a beloved pet is one of those.

The wound is terribly raw and fresh; having lost Jerry just on the 18^th. I’m not going to elaborate in detail here as we really don’t know what exactly happened. Overall, I guess we can chalk it up to the perils of him being an outside cat during the day; one who lived to hunt and ate most of his kills and may have ingested something bad. We had gotten back from the Northwoods days before and he was very happy to be back on our property where the hunting was much better.

One day he came in early and started laying around. He has in the past caught and eaten too many creatures at once, so we figured he had just overeaten. That stretched into the next day, when he didn’t want to go out and he started refusing his normal food. By the third day I was worried about a possible blockage of some sort, so I spent most of the day in Appleton at an ER vet hospital. The creature showed up on x-ray in his colon so seemed to be digesting ok but he showed a possible urine blockage as his bladder was huge. 

Since the ER hospital was charging a pretty penny, I got Jerry into the animal shelter vet who works in Waupaca part time by the next day. Because of our long history of volunteer work with them, we get a real price break on the vet bills. Jerry was indeed blocked so he had surgery and bloodwork. 

From that point forward it was almost a daily occurrence for us to transport him down there for subcutaneous fluid injection as he wasn’t eating or drinking much. Bloodwork was again checked and showed no improvement. The vet had to be absent nearly a week to attend an out of state family emergency and when he returned on the 17^th we repeated bloodwork. That showed Jerry was in full kidney failure so there was no hope. 

A blessing of small-town vets is that some of them still make house calls. Jerry was a timid boy who hated riding in the car and he grew to cower every morning when I’d pick him up knowing he was going back to the clinic for more needle pokes. We couldn’t stand the thought of his last moments being under such stress, in such a scary environment, so we made arrangements for the vet to come to our home that Friday evening. 

Jerry had a good last day. We had been putting his leash on and then following him around as he hunted for up to an hour or two since this seemed to give him some happy time. Our weather has been beautiful this October, so thankfully, the days were warm and filled with sunshine instead of being rainy and gloomy which would have confined him indoors. Sometimes it was hard to imagine he was so sick and dying.

After his final walk with Marc, he came up onto my lap and snuggled next to my neck on my shoulder where I was able to get my final precious hour with him. And that’s where he remained as the vet did the two injections necessary. 

Earlier in the day Marc had dug a grave in the front flowerbed where Jerry liked to hang out, and it was such a beautiful evening, I moved with Jerry curled up in my arms looking like he was napping, out into a chair on the front porch. I sat and stroked him and told him what a good boy he was and how much he was loved until I figured he had had time to grow his angel wings and head up into the darkening evening sky for the Rainbow Bridge. We wrapped him in towels, placed him in a box, in the hole in the ground, I threw the last dahlia of the season on top and Marc shoveled the hole closed.  Getting past missing him is the hardest part and I’m nowhere near that yet. I've never had such a loving cat.

Godspeed, my sweetest ever boy.

 

Am I Cut Out for This?

 

I have been struggling for weeks to find something to blog about but have failed miserably. It seems as though it’s all been said and it’s only the mundane that appears on the horizon each day.

We go about our normal lives; shuttling back and forth between our two places, to take care of each place’s needs. Living lake life is probably a life long dream for many, but the reality for me hasn’t quite met up to the fantasy. For one thing, living in the forest, I had no idea how the woods constantly shed, extremely so in times of high winds, and without daily pickup of downed sticks it becomes impossible to keep neat and tidy. In anything over 20 mph winds, I find I am picking up thin broken branches as long as six feet or more. Thus, our burn pile never truly goes away; it only builds up for the next round.

I have also questioned whether I am truly cut out to be a second home owner. Let’s be realistic: at our ages, even keeping up with the maintenance of our two acre property, shop and house seem like enough especially when you throw in being gone for such long stretches at a time. A case in point is our front stairway; it was always Marc’s intention to replace the temporary steps with Trex to match the rest of the front porch, but was one of those things he never got around to. Well, as the wood rotted, it suddenly became expedient that he do so, so he spent two rounds of five days each in Waupaca building the new staircase and it’s still not finished. It should be nice when it is.

On top of maintenance efforts of having two places, comes the double costs and the time and boredom factor of always shuttling back and forth between the two. Yes, it’s a beautiful relatively traffic-free drive on decent roads, but it’s the better part of nearly three hours each way. Utility costs are ongoing in both places to some extent whether we use them or not. Our electric provider in the Northwoods is a co-op and the service standby fee just to have the benefit of the service is $40/month before even one turn of that little KWH dial. The fiber optic internet cable even when shut off also has a standby fee and the propane tank is leased, so it has an annual fee. And of course, the government never cares where you are so property taxes accrue on both parcels. Oh, and let’s not forget the homeowner’s insurance! 

To add insult to injury, sometimes Nature may step in like she did at the end of June and rip through with a horrendous storm—causing us to spend virtually the rest of the summer doing clean-up duties. I lost track of the times we’ve had bonfires to get rid of all the downed and tree cutting we had to deal with for the frickin’ third summer in a row! 

I guess it may be no wonder the blush is off my rose despite just how stunning and lovely this property is. We didn’t get everything done to it this summer we had hoped so I know we’ll likely be here again next summer but that may become a turning point for us where we seriously consider putting it on the market. A lot depends upon how the market goes—it has represented way too much work to not be able to realize a significant gain off our efforts.

 

Marc has decided to back off remodeling our home kitchen until we sell this so our winter won’t have much excitement going on. I’ve been ordering and gathering new materials and embellishments to continue to do my art for the benefit of the animal shelter. I plan to return soon; Marc will remain here to button up the place and finalize a few things he needs to do so it’ll be October sometime for his return. He does need some good weather to finish the staircase build before it snows.

Until next time…

 

Two Old People VS a Hundred Trees

 

Well, maybe not a hundred, but it’s sure felt like it! I’m referring, of course, to our cleanup efforts that have been required from our big storm in late June, which either knocked down or over trees in all five sections of our hilltop forest. 

We’ve been chipping away at it slowly and after a month have seen the vast majority of the cleanup finished. Over 2/3rds for sure. It’s required lots of chain-sawing, dragging out trees to a central location, limbing, stacking of wood, then giant bonfires to get rid of it.

right after storm

hard hit storm damage area

after some cleanup

after some cleanup

latest pile ready for burning

right after storm

Marc chainsaw clearing

after most cleanup

Views really opened up!

Marc’s made a couple trips back and forth to Waupaca for yard care and I have only left the property twice for a quick trip to the local grocery store. It’s been a grind that I hope never has to be repeated. 

When Marc’s back gives out from working with the chain saw, he switches things up by building more of the stairway to the pier. It finally came together enough with a temporary handrail that we could at least use it to get up and down. He still needs to finalize a handrail on both sides and connect it with a landing of some sort to where the pier starts out across the bog from the last of the solid land. He’s still designing that in his head but it will add another couple of steps at least; right now, we stand at 33 steps. Yes, it’s a steep bastard…

Even the cats enjoy the new stairs

We finally warmed up into the 80’s and are thankful we’ve dodged the terrible heatwaves and fires happening elsewhere across the U.S. I can’t say it’s been a particularly fun summer for us; in fact, we’re talking about leaving early—maybe by late September so we can still enjoy some good weather to do some outside maintenance on our home place. Marc also wants to build a small storage shed to replace the one that was original to the property and has now become full of wood rot. 

We sold the pontoon boat but are holding off on buying any other kind of boat until at least next summer, but it really comes down to how much longer we feel we may own this property. With the cost of living increasing so rapidly over the past couple of years and values reaching staggering heights for lake-front properties, it’s been tempting to think about putting it on the market, especially with all the sweat equity gain. A lot can happen between now and next year though so for now it’s just a thought. We do really enjoy it tremendously so it will be a hard and considered decision. However, it does add complications to our lives which we’re not sure we need at this point in our older age. We seem to fall farther and farther behind on keeping up with our main house since summers are the only time we can do outside maintenance and yard improvements there. It gets costly going back and forth all the time with both fuel and our time. Whenever we need an item, it always seems to be “at the other place”, so we often have to spend yet more money duplicating things. And finally, sometimes it feels selfish since this is solely for our use and enjoyment yet represents a significant chunk of change that isn’t generating any income. More retirement income would always be a most welcome thing!! 

Lots to think about. Right now, we’re only looking ahead as far as winter, when we’re contemplating finally getting our kitchen completed in the main house. Marc doesn’t want to or isn’t capable of doing the work himself, so we’d have to hire it done, which will be a novel idea for us. You’ll have to stick around to see how that goes, ha!