Time Passages

One year ago today, I began my new life in Florida,

Two years ago today, I didn't know Linda was my sister.

Three years ago today, we were on vacation in Lancaster.

I didn't know then that it was the beginning of the end. But that trip was the start of everything changing. The first change was driving: Nick decided that I should start doing more of the driving. This may seem minor, but he had always been the driver; I had always been the navigator. When we were first married, I didn't even have a driver's license. And his sense of direction was, to put it kindly, not finely developed. (I remember, one time on vacation, someone stopped us and asked for directions; Nick started to tell them we weren't locals, while I started giving detailed directions to the destination, two towns over. Nick never did understand how I knew the answer.)

But suddenly, I was driving, driving on that last trip we made together to Lancaster, I drove the first, short, leg: home to Country Junction, because I didn't need a navigator for that. He drove the bulk of the trip, Country Junction to Lancaster. But the whole time we were in Lancaster, I was the driver. That was pretty frustrating for me, While I knew all the major roads, and even many of the back roads, we did not spend enough time in Lancaster for me to have the entire county map in my head. So, any time there was a road closed, I had to figure out how to best re-route us, from memory, without a map. (GPS is only so good when your destination is "let's go past that farm we like on that road where the guy has a sculpture in the yard.) Nick's map reading skills may have been fine to figure out if there was a rest stop coming up on the interstate, but figuring out where we were on the map of the back roads and then figuring out the next road to take was not quite so easy, Even more frustrating for me was realizing the difference between being the passenger, occasionally looking at the map, but mostly enjoying the scenery. When you're driving, you can't also be the tourist. In retrospect, I am glad that Nick got to have the tourist experience, but at the time, I wasn't so thrilled.

Health-wise, it was a difficult trip. He had a major flare-up; his medications were not giving him much relief. We didn't really do all of our usual stuff. His enthusiasm was down. I should have realized how different life was to be when I drove all the way home, not so much because I wanted to, but because he fell asleep in the first ten minutes, and slept all the way home.

Once we got home, he still insisted on me doing the driving whenever we were together. So I would drive to work, he would drive home; he would drive back to pick me up, I would drive home. The first time I had to pump gas was a real comedy; I couldn't understand where the lever was to unlock the gas tank, and popped the hood instead. And that winter, I hated getting out of the warm car to pump gas in the cold and snow. There were quite a few times when I seriously considered driving the extra miles to buy gas in New Jersey.

Time passages. Autumn marched on. I continued to drive; otherwise, our lives didn't change much.

You don't know how strong denial is until later....