Five years ago today I would never have imagined it, living here in Florida.
Five years ago I’d been retired for about 6 months. Randy and I lived in a big house, on 3.5 acres, with a huge garage and shop we built for Randy less than 3 years earlier. It was winter in central Missouri. We were leaving in a few days to spend 2 weeks in the Florida Keys, and then meander home leisurely. That meander included a visit to my sister, Lisa’s, in Naples, and a stop in the Englewood area to reconnect with some Air Force friends we hadn’t seen for several years. It was a perfect time to get out of the cold, grey winter weather typical in the early months of the year in Missouri. Winter weather that had begun to affect me more than ever thought it would. I was convinced I was developing a condition called SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Not ever prone to depression, the winter months made me melancholy. A lot.
Between 2019 and 2021, we traveled to Florida to enjoy the warmth and the sun 4 times. I fell in love with southwest Florida in the winter.
Sometime between the 2nd and 3rd trip I started day dreaming about living with year round sun, sand, and swimming. We brainstormed how we might spend more time down there in the winter months. I declared that if we ever moved to Florida (we couldn’t afford to live in Missouri AND have a second home in Florida), I wanted to live in Southwest Florida. Randy declared that was never going to happen.
Just a few weeks after we got home to Missouri in March, Randy came to me one morning claiming he was ready to move to Florida if that’s what I really wanted to do. He shocked me.
You bet I wanted to move to Florida. There was no further discussion about IF. I didn’t give him a chance to change his mind. Within 2 weeks the house was listed. It sold the first day on the market in a very lucrative (for us) bidding war. We closed less than a month later, so quickly that we were, technically, homeless, for a couple of months.
July 2026 will mark 5 years that we’ve been in Florida, and I am happier today, living here, than the I can ever remember being.
I just spoke to my mom who, you will recall, lives in Wisconsin. It’s 7˚there at the moment. Tonight’s low is predicted to be -4˚. When I spoke to Lynn in Missouri an hour or so ago, it was 14˚, with the overnight low tonight at -3˚. On top of that they got about 6 inches of snow yesterday. I am overwhelmingly glad we no longer live in either of those places. I went for a walk between the 2 phone calls and the temperature was 79˚.
It’s not just avoiding the cold temperatures in the winter that makes me love Florida so much. The sky is different here. It seems brighter, bluer, happier, to me somehow. The big fluffy white clouds also make me joyful. There’s an energy in my life I can’t describe or explain that is wonder-ful. And a peace that surrounds me nearly everywhere we go here in Florida. It’s tangible and comforting.
Growing up, I never aspired to live in Florida. The first time I’d ever been to the Sunshine State was when my parents treated all of us kids to a road trip to Disney World and Epcot Center in 1978. Mom had saved her waitressing money for years to be able to treat all of us to that grand adventure. By the time they’d saved enough money to make that trip possible, I was already married and living in Illinois. Randy got to come along too.
That trip was packed with mid-Florida visits to Orlando and mom’s family near there. My brother was stationed in Jacksonville on the U.S.S. Saratoga so we saw him and his world. And there were lots of other cousins who’d migrated to the Miami area. One of my most vivid recollections was running across a coral snake (highly venomous) identified by my uncle on his property in Ocala. My sister spent too much time in the sun and got sun poisoning. That trip is still a fabulous family memory. Yet, I didn’t come home thinking I’d want to live in Florida someday.
Randy and I took another road trip to Florida about 20 years later. We were in our 40s, perhaps it was after Randy retired from the Air Force and we moved back to Wisconsin. As we traveled, stopped at restaurants to eat, motels to spend the night, leisurely taking our sweet time, we pretended we were very young retired people. Oh, we knew we had to return to real life, but that was a fun trip, kind of prepping us for future retired life. Again, still, we never thought about living in Florida.
For the 15 years before Randy retired from the Air Force, we lived in fairly warm climates. There was the 3 years in the Pacific on a tropic island (Guam) from 1979-1982, then the 12 years in Sacramento, CA. If we wanted real cold there, we traveled a couple of hours and several thousand feet in elevation to the Sierra Nevada mountains. I can tell you with certainty, we never wanted real cold. I love moderate to warm weather. We were spoiled by the places the Air Force made us live. Which is why, when Randy got orders to Alaska in 1993, we knew our location luck had run out. We decided he should exercise his option to retire from the Air Force.
Suddenly, after 20 years, we got to choose where in the world we wanted to live. We had a big white decision board with all the places we were interested in. The Air Force would move us anywhere in the country we wanted to go. I don’t remember Florida even making the cut on that list. The warmest place I do remember was Las Vegas.
We marked up that board for weeks, adding and erasing places. In the end we decided, for reasons having to do with family rather than weather, to return to Wisconsin when he retired. His dad died in 1996. After that, with 3 remaining healthy parents, we were shopping for a Christmas tree one day. The wind chill was -20˚ or something ridiculous like that. We looked at each other and said, “You know, we don’t HAVE to live here.” We started planning to move again.
Still, living in Florida wasn’t even a consideration. In 1998, I moved south again, to Missouri. We’d never been there. We picked it off the internet with the help of it being on the Money magazine list of the best places to live in the country. The boating season was longer, its weather was warmer, and it seemed like a decent place to make a living. We made the decision and moved in October 1998.
We lived happily in Missouri for more than 20 years. As we contemplated retirement and old age, the only move we expected to make was to a smaller, one-story house. We made a move all right, in 2018, but the wonderful house we chose was neither smaller, nor one-story. But as they say, location, location, location. We fell in love with the location.
Randy had stopped working a job shortly after we moved into that house. Instead, he spent his time working on it. There were so many projects and remodels we wanted to do to make it our forever home. He still worked pretty hard, but for us. Having him do that was far smarter financially than him continuing to work a job and paying someone else to work on our house.
Which brings us to the timeline I began this post on.
I know lots of you reading this can’t do without the change of seasons. But I ask you…after this week, doesn’t living in Florida just sound a tiny bit….well, wonderful?
P.S. Went for an oncologist check-up yesterday. All is well. I feel great and there’s no early 2026 health news that might disrupt the swimming season. Life is good.
Leave a Reply