A Dream Realized Chapter Six

Our daughter was born in the spring of 1978 and she was the darling of the neighborhood.  She was a very bright, precocious little girl from the get-go.  As she got older she knew perfectly well that the dolled-up babes we saw every day at Cala Foods were actually men.  Selling women's clothing to an ever increasing refrain of "how much off?" was beginning to wear a little thin with my husband and we thought it might be time to move our little family to a more conventional environment.  Yet again, my husband girded his loins and went in search of another job.  Quite unintentionally, he landed in car sales and we moved to half of a duplex rental in a town about 45 minutes north of San Francisco.  My husband sold cars for 15 years.  There were months of beer and beans and months of champagne and steak so to speak.

We had to move on from there a couple of years later because our landlord put our home on the market.  Time to push further north to a cute, funky little rental house located in the country.  This house was in a beautiful valley filled with vineyards and peppered with impossibly rich people.  Our mailing address was that of the charming little town of which we were so enamoured on our 1975 vacation.  We were getting closer.  This was a mere seven years after our discovery of this place.  Amazing!

I touched briefly upon our time spent in this little house in a former entry telling of the fierce battle between our kitty and a skunk.http://journals.aol.com/springsnymph/AnotherCountryHeardFrom/entries/177

We lived in this house for about three years until yet again our landlord decided to put the house on the market.  Once more, it was time to move on but this time my mother-in-law offered to help us with a considerable down payment on a house.  This was most kind and generous of her.  I'm quite sure we would never have been able to purchase a house in this area without her help.  We found a house in our price range and went through that fun experience (!) of buying a house.  We experienced a bit of a sticky wicket between the time we had to leave our rented house which had sold and our offer on the house had yet to be finalized.  We were in limbo and had to move somewhere.  We ended up moving into a small apartment in the town of our desire on my daughter's seventh birthday in April of 1985.  We had to put most of our belongings in a storage unit.

After waiting through what seemed to be an interminably long time, at last the deal on the house came though and we moved into our house in May.  Our son was born three years later in 1988 and we've been living here very happily ever since for 19 years; truly a dream realized.