I had another dream that I never imagined could come true and that was to live on Ocracoke Island. However, it came true as well. A series of events led to us being here full time. After Neal's parents died we had the financial resources to purchase a house. We originally planned to rent it but quickly fell in love with the little cottage and decided to keep it for use by us and for friends and family. I was still working at the time and had just started a new job I really enjoyed. I planned to stay there for four years, until my teaching license expired, and then then I would retire.
After working at my new job for two years I began to feel torn between work life and home life. My husband has a variety of health issues and was, by the spring of 2012, unable to work. It became obvious to me as the months progressed that he needed me to be with him at doctor visits and needed my company at home.
I am not the type of person who can leave work "at the office"; teaching was all or nothing for me. I was beginning to feel as if I could never recharge. Weekends, holidays, even summers were not enough. In a 2 1/2 year time span, we lost all of our parents, both of Neal's maternal aunts, Neal's younger brother, a good friend, and had numerous surgeries, hospitalizations, car wrecks, and so on, all within our immediate family. The four years I had planned to work became reduced to three, then two and a half, and finally, just two. I left a job I loved but a job for which I was steadily losing energy to do.
So, we began spending more and more time at our Ocracoke house. I became very involved in community volunteer work and we both loved life on the island. Meanwhile, in Thomasville, our large house on 5.71 acres with it's guest cottage (housing our daughter), large outbuildings, and many tools and pieces of machinery sat, unattended, uncared for, and not maintained.
My niece and her husband mentioned buying our property last fall and came by to look at the house. She partly grew up in this house so it felt like home to her. However, after several months of not hearing back from them we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would need to keep going back and forth between homes, a task that was becoming more and more difficult.
We were on Ocracoke in February when I received a text from my niece; she said that they were ready to get serious about buying a home and they wanted ours.
I freaked out. I FREAKED OUT! I am not really using that term carelessly. We had lived in that house for 32 years. We had raised three children. We had lots of storage space. LOTS of storage space. It was all full. We returned to Thomasville and got to work.
After much cleaning out; after many truckloads of useless stuff to the recycling center and to the dump; after a mega two-day yard sale (I made tons of money...yay!), and after donating lots and lots, the house at last belonged to my niece and her husband.
It was a wonderful place to raise children; it was a quiet refuge from the world, and now my 6 year old great-niece, champion bug collector and toad catcher, will have a chance to grow up there too. And our daughter stays in her cottage. We needed to sell that house, but couldn't let it go. What a blessing that we could lighten our load and, after moving 8 times in as many years, our loved ones now have their dream home.
Our journey isn't over though. We have made an offer on a different Ocracoke house. Neal wants a house on a canal so he can dock his boat, something we now pay someone else to do. We will be moving around mid to late October and we will be selling this sweet little house in which we now live.
Sometimes dreams can't come true; sometimes though, they do.
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| Our former house. |
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| The toad-catcher herself. |
