I promised you the rest of the story…..or at least more of it.
I felt the first of many tugs….proding me me to go back to the town I grew up in…a few years ago. It started with a box, random things from my childhood, all stuffed neatly in a cardboard moving box. I had lugged it around all over the country, every time I relocated. No matter where I lived….this box….always occupied the same spot…. shoved way in the back of my bedroom closet.
One day….five years ago, I saw it there, when I was looking for something else….seems like most of the time that’s how things like this have a way of happening.
It was still sealed from the first time I packed it 20 years earlier… At 19, I was at a crossroads in my life…my Mom was moving to Florida and my Dad had retired and moved to Nebraska. For my Dad, moving to Nebraska was the final chapter in his quest to return to a place that always held a special place in his heart. A place, where over a hundred and eighty years ago, his mother’s ancestors migrated to from England, via New York…in order to start a new life as farmers.
Dad wasn’t born and raised there…his destiny had already been decided when his mother, a writer, moved to the Chicago area, after having married his father, a railroad man from Sweden. Growing up, my Dad spent his summers on his Aunt Iola’s farm. Endless fields of corn, wide open prairies, rich blue skies untainted by city pollution, and quiet so deep at night the only sound you heard, was the air rushing in and out of your lungs. For my Dad, this was where his heart was.
After my parents divorced, my Dad took me with him on his first trip back to Nebraska…a place he hadn’t been back to in over 20 years. I was 10… We went back every year, for the first few years, it was just my father and I. He remarried when I was 13, expanding our pilgrimage from 2 to 5, with the addition of his bride and 2 young sons. Year after year, we carried on this tradition until he retired from the railroad, and relocated to Nebraska….”home”
I continued these visits. at first as a single young adult, then as a newlywed. My Dad, settled now….having found himself again…amid the open plains…realized there was still something missing….a connection with his now grown children. He had a dream of starting a family business, where all of us would congregate to Nebraska, and be together.
During one of our trips, my Dad took my husband and I on a drive….said he wanted to show us something. He had an idea, he explained as we traveled down a gravel road in the middle of nowhere. Past one of our cousins farms, past what seemed like miles of cornfields, past pastures dotted with prairie dog mounds….until we came to a stop on the side of the road.
Up on a hill, was an old farmhouse…
My Dad pointed to it and asked me if I liked it. He said it was for sale, if we moved to Nebraska, he would buy it… we could live there and pay him practically nothing for rent. I was young, 19…up for adventure…and excited about the idea of moving to Nebraska, a place I had grown to love…as much as my Dad did. I too had special memories of spending time there, every summer…riding horses, going places with my cousins…and most of all, getting to know my Dad, a man who was still very much a mystery to me.
The next day, I hit the pavement…applying for jobs. Back in Wisconsin, I was working as a nurses aid in a retirement facility in Milwaukee…so I focused on trying to get work at a nursing home. My husband, a forklift operator at Menards, applied at lumber yards etc. For the next week we interviewed…and were told there wasn’t anything available at the time, however they would keep us in mind should something come up.
Before we knew it, our vacation time was up… it was time to leave, dream in hand…resigned to continue our life back home. We’d tried, failed, and understood it just wasn’t meant to be. I promised my Dad we could come back the next year, and do it all over again…maybe then it would work out.
A month later, when moving to Nebraska had taken a back seat to our day-to-day activities, I received a call from my Mom. She had decided to sell the house in East Troy, and move to Florida. Did we want to come? I think we pondered the idea for a total of 5 minutes, before we said…Florida?….Hell yes, we’d love to come.
Funny thing about crossroads in life….you never realize you are at one until years later.
Two weeks after we had set the wheels in motion to move to Florida, both my husband and I received phones calls, within hours of each other. The first, was one of the nursing homes I had applied at…they needed someone…when could I start? The second call, was for my husband…the lumber yard had an unexpected opening…could he start next week?
My dream come true…
However, even the best of dreams evolve…starting as a random thought….growing, changing…based on situations….circumstances. Palm trees, balmy weather, sandy beaches, and an ocean I had yet to see…became my new dream.
I didn’t tell my Dad about the job offers, he never would have understood. Afraid he’d view it as a competition between he and my Mom, with the latter being victorious, I kept the choice I made to myself.
We sold what little we had…hell bent on starting fresh. The remainder of our worldly possessions, were loaded into the back of my Mom’s moving van. In the midst of those twenty or so boxes, was one…labeled Becky. Remnants of who I was, someone I didn’t want to be anymore… condensed to a single cardboard vessel.
On a dreary fall day in 1985, I set out to see just what the rest of the world had in store for me. Leaving Wisconsin, and East Troy in the rearview mirror….soon to become a distant memory.
I never once looked back….
At least until….I opened that box.
To be continued…..
BM
