Here's where we are

It's a Sunday morning and we're in Arizona. This was going to be our second explore-a-move trip. We scheduled it back in April, along with the Florida trip we took in early May.

I remember the weekend we decided we were going to have to get on a plane and go see and feel the Pasco-Hernando County area in Florida that Bruce was falling in love with on the internet.  I had applied for a job at the community college there. Our early strategy about moving was that I'd apply at community colleges in places we thought we'd like and then we'd see if I got an interview somewhere. Reports from our friends about this north-of-Tampa area weren't great. We heard it was "blue collar." "Tacky." Not at all like the part of Key West we've spent so much time in, or Sarasota where Bruce went to New College.

It was becoming clear to me that we were going to have to make decisions about moving without any job offer. Bruce was staying up every night until 2a.m. looking at real estate on the internet (exactly as he did before we bought our Eden Prairie house in 1999). He was also starting to correspond with residents of the Pasco-Hernando county area--a journalist, a business woman/community activist (who wound up referring us to our Florida realtor)--to find out what living there was like. He would call me in to our office several times each evening to look at various houses he'd found and studied. He was sort of bonding with the area. There came a point when I just said we have to get our feet on the ground there to experience the place, before this goes any farther.

Then our thinking shifted.  We realized that if we could check out an area of Florida we thought we might like--without a job offer but with community colleges in the area--then we could check out parts of Phoenix and Virginia as well.  We scheduled two trips that weekend--Florida and Phoenix. We never got Virginia on the calendar.  As you know, one day in to the Florida trip, we saw Damen Lane in Port Richey.

Here is where we spent so much time thinking and processing and talking those few days in Florida. We used Marriott points to stay here in Clearwater, which was our base as we drove either north or south each day to explore.

You can see a little "tiki roof" on the left at the end of the boardwalk (in the picture with the couple walking). That's an outdoor bar where we had a couple important sessions. And we spent a lot of time talking in the mornings and evenings in the living room--before and after driving around all day.

We covered so much territory on that trip; intense inner landscapes and outward tropical terrain. The first thing I had to get used to in a hurry was that Key West does not equal Florida proper. One of the next things we had to sort out, because we were falling so hard for the Damen house, was that maybe--like our favorite saying "You don't take a trip. A trip takes you."--the same principle applied to what we were contemplating here. You don't make a move. A move makes you. Instead of insisting on figuring everything out ahead of time, maybe the move itself is a kind of alchemy that gets you rearranged. That may sound magical but magical is how the Damen house feels to us. In a psychic reading my friend Kim did for us, she said: "Part of the appeal of this home is that...animals and birds will come right into your yard and they will teach you many things in which you will delight. The animals watch over the burial ground [in what we call "the nature preserve" directly north of us we're told there are Indian burial sites], the old ones watch over the animals--it's a symbiotic relationship. You will have experiences here that you won't be able to explain, but after a while they will seem like everyday occurrences. The house has been "looking for" some humans who will appreciate the beauty and history of its surroundings. No coincidence that this property captured your heart." The magic was already afoot.

Here's where we are right now, in Scottsdale. At a Westin in the lap of luxury. We traded a week of our timeshare to get here.
I spent hours in the tub last night reading about the HBO series Treme in the Sunday NYT magazine.

We have an entire "villa," which is like one big apartment and one little apartment. The big apartment has a full kitchen, the bathroom pictured above (plus a huge shower), a balcony and king-sized bed in the bedroom. The little apartment has its own living room, kitchenette, balcony, queen size bed in the bedroom, and not-as-splendid bathroom. I have the bed in the little apartment for one more night, before Bruce's brother Michael and our soon-to-be official sister-in-law Sheryl arrive tomorrow.

We spent all of yesterday afternoon sitting outside on couches under palo verde trees (drinking a couple mimosas). We had to wrestle with heart vs. head concerns about buying Gulf coast property 40 days into the BP oil volcano. We try like crazy to honor Bruce's "head" concerns about why doing this now is irrational. But our hearts win every time, in every discussion we have.

We need to be sure because the closing date on Damen is May 28th.