So the next little bit gets a little involved and confusing. Hang with me or skip it.
The week after dh retired we drove from our home to Oklahoma for the 4th of July. At that time, our daughter (hereby known as dd - you got it, darling daughter) was married with 2 children to a horribly abusive and scary man. The 4th of July became known as her Independence Day (still celebrated with fireworks!) when she took the kids, ages 2 and 3, and disappeared. We had no idea where she was and were in a panic. After a couple of days, we found out she was in a shelter and basically in hiding from the husband. Not to get into details, I ended up staying with her in an apartment to get her stabilized and help her to get the divorce proceedings started and to take care of the kids while she worked. One week followed another until 3 months had passed and I was ready to go home. Her little boy, my sweetest little 3 year old sidekick and buddy, needed his tonsils out, so I decided to stay until he was feeling better. This was around middle of October. He had his surgery, we brought him home late that afternoon, fed him jello and he was doing fine, a little groggy. Pretty normal following his day in the OR. The next morning we woke to find that he had passed away in the night. Eventually we found out that he had passed away due to a combination of codeine overdose and sensitivity to the codeine. That same week another little boy, 7 years old, died of an overdose from the same hospital following a removal of an ingrown toenail. Sad, sad time. Needless to say, I ended up staying with dd until December.
While I was still there, dh called me from a golf trip he had taken with a bunch of the good, ole retired guys. He told me to go look at houses on a PGA golf course in the town we lived in when the older kids were growing up. I really wasn't interested, but we had always enjoyed looking at model homes and had done a lot of house hunting due to moving frequently for dh job. So off I went. I thought he was just interested in what was going on in that area since it had been 15 years or more since we lived there. We talked later and he asked if there were any houses that we might enjoy. I said, sure. He said, Buy it. Just like that. I figured he was just blowing hot air in front of his buds (he had started boasting to people and inflating our financial position a little by that time. It embarrassed me. But I figured it was a midlife crisis or some such). I told him no, that if he was so interested, come buy it yourself. And he did. I didn't know what to think, but I had always trusted him and he didn't always give reasons for his actions, but he was seldom wrong. I was still reeling from the sudden death of our grandson and I had also lost my Dad suddenly the previous year. I was off balance and just let him run with it. My newly widowed mother and my disabled sister lived in Oklahoma also and were struggling. Our dd was still in the middle of a nasty divorce. Our oldest son had 2 beautiful little girls we wanted to be closer to. So it made a certain sense to move to Oklahoma from Michigan to help take care of all of the family. So, we wrote a contract on the OK house and came home and put our dream home on the market. I cried.
I put some conditions on the move. Both of our younger sons were getting married summer of 2005, and I told him I would not move until after the weddings. Telling my sons that we were leaving and moving back to Oklahoma was one of the hardest things I ever did. They couldn't understand it. Neither could I. I couldn't help them understand what I didn't understand. We bought the house in OK and listed it to rent until after the weddings. The housing bubble burst in Mi, and we had a terrible time trying to sale our home. But we finally sold it (at a loss) and in October we packed up a truck and moved all our stuff 1000 miles from my heart's home. I drove our truck and cried all the way to the door of our beautiful new home. During the moving process another little clue to the growing problem with my dh happened. He was taking a treadmill we didn't want to the second hand sports store to sell. After a while, he came back with a sheepish grin. The treadmill had fallen out of the truck and broke up all over the road. I was too busy to think about it. He had put the treadmill in the truck standing up and not even strapped it in! What! This from a guy who never made stupid mistakes.
And we lived unhappily ever after. Just kidding! We lived in Oklahoma for 2 years. I developed severe respiratory symptoms and was miserable and very sick. My Mom, bless her God loving heart, told me that if I wanted to move back to MI, she and my sister would also move to MI to be with us. Talk about God providing! (Even though I didn't know at that time how much I was going to need them.) We sold the house in Oklahoma, losing even more money, and bought a foreclosed home in the community we had left in MI. Not in the planned community I loved, but on a busy street next to our huge high school. When our youngest son saw the house as it was, he said, you have lost your minds! Little did he know that, indeed, we were fast traveling down that very road. The house was a foreclosure and was trashed, but it met most of our needs and we could afford it. And we had always wanted to "flip" a house. And dh said he loved it.
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