One of our forever friends is here this week. We so enjoy having friends and family visit to be able to share the abundant life we live in Florida. For our friend Bill, this is a respite in his normal routine of caring, with his wife, for his 95-year old mother-in-law in their home.
We aren’t doing a lot of the tourist activities, but rather just hanging around for rest and relaxation. And eating. Boy, we all love to eat.
Years ago, after we moved to the Sacramento, California area, Randy’s sister and her husband found jobs in that area too. For their first 6 months or so in California, they lived with us. Later, after we moved to Missouri, they followed us there and lived with us again for several months while they remodeled the home they bought. We’ve always loved having family and friends visit for long or short times, and we were blessed to be able to live in interesting places far from most of their normal lives. Jokingly, our house, wherever we were, came to be called Grathen’s Springboard Lodge and Motor Inn.
In Missouri, Randy and I sold our boat and camper several years ago. It was a lot of work to pack and unpack, trailer, insure, clean, and maintain those toys for the amount of enjoyment they added to our lives. We decided instead to create an outdoor space at home for the leisure activities we loved most on the boat and in the camper (swim, nap, read, and eat). We designed a shaded area in the back yard with hammocks and reading chairs and put up a small above ground pool. The space also included a terrific outdoor kitchen for Randy to grill and experiment with cowboy cooking to his heart’s content. We always welcomed friends and family to our newly dubbed Grathen’s Staycation Resort.
Now that we’re living in Florida, we’ve had (happily) lots of friends and family already visit in the first year we’ve been down here. When another of Randy’s sisters and her husband were here last November, we were sitting around the kitchen table reminiscing about the places we lived and all the visits they’d made to our homes from their home in North Carolina. Kristine quipped that since we claimed we were never moving again, we now need to call our home Grathen’s Last Resort.
We laughed like loons at that. She meant it as a joke, but it’s perfect, isn’t it? There’s a double entendre, and it’s very aptly named. So Grathen’s Last Resort it is. Our outdoor living space here includes a caged (to keep the Florida bugs out) pool and lanai area with plenty of shade, many reading and lounge chairs, a grillmaster’s dream grill, and a big patio table for gathering and game playing. We’re still working on the hammock for Randy but are closing in on what he thinks will be a good solution for the outdoor napping situation.
In Florida we practically live outdoors. I believe God didn’t create us to be cooped up in air-tight heated and/or air conditioned spaces. Fresh air is good for the body, mind, and soul. There’s just something about being outdoors that refreshes and renews and calms and invigorates. If you haven’t tried it lately, I urge you to make an effort to spend more time outdoors and let me know how it affects you.
Randy and I are grateful we have the opportunity to share so many of our blessings with friends and family. “Last resort” is defined as something done if nothing else works. Usually that has a negative connotation, but we aren’t thinking in negative terms. We tried everything else, and finally (finally!), we found that everything else is lacking and this (this house, this place, retirement) is the BEST way. We’re settled now, more content than we’ve ever been, in a place we think of as heaven on earth. There’s nothing we can imagine that’s better, nowhere we’d rather be. A blessing beyond measure.
P.S. If you’d like to share our blessings, call us for a reservation at Grathen’s Last Resort.
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