~a part of the "plan", 4 decades later"

Greetings friends and family, from 611 miles away from home in Kansas~here along the western slopes in Montrose, Colorado.  I have taken a couple of personal days off from school and headed out west to spend some time with Mike.  Funny how I used to think that heading out "west" was travelling to places like Finney County, Kansas.  The journey here was my fifth one since the first of the year and the drive has become somewhat easier each time that I have made it.  I'm thankful for that, especially since I remember the horrible dread that I felt during my very first trip out in early January.  The "Pass" at  Monarch Mountain seemed like a sinister and evil giant waiting there in the lurch to swallow me up as I crossed over it.  In the darkness of the still early morning hours, I finally made it over the top and much to my surprise, I was alive and well when I arrived at the bottom of the mountain.  I can almost laugh about it now, even with a still broken rib, but that early January morning it was anything BUT funny.  Actually it was kind of downright scary.

This current trip was planned many weeks back now and I remember how it seemed like the 6 weeks between the time of the trip's inception until now at this very moment in time would drag on and on and "perpetual" on.  But as I look back at it tonight, shoot the time really went by a lot faster than I would have thought and for that I am glad!  Tonight we are sitting here, Mike and I, talking about life and what we foresee the future bringing for us here in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado.  Although it's a little hard to imagine being so blessed at this moment in time, we are most certainly that.  And with a lot of peace and love in our hearts for one another,  we have made a decision that will forever change the lives that we have been leading up until now.  Come the 21st day of May, we shall marry one another and spend the days remaining for each of us on this earth, together.

I know that never in my "wildest of dreams" did I figure that I would ever get married to  someone from the "land of long ago and far, far away".   If you were to ask Mike, he would probably say the very same thing.  Our paths barely crossed back in those days at Haven High School and even though we had kind of/sort of  heard of one another, we surely didn't anticipate what might happen for us in the years ahead.  We were just two kids in the hallways, not unlike the hundreds of others there at the time.  There was a plan for both of us to be together, yet it would take nearly 4 decades of waiting time before it would come to fruition.  When you consider the different paths that each of us have taken since those days of the 1970's, it almost seems miraculous that we would have ever found one another again.  Heck, a person could win the lottery with better odds than we had of meeting each other once more.  But as I have learned many times before and will surely witness many times yet to come before I die, you just don't know what lies ahead of you and the things that you LEAST expect to happen are often times the ones that happen more often than not.  Meeting a man like Mike Renfro is one of those least expected things.

Friends, there's something that I really want to tell you.  I've been divorced now for 10 years, a "lifetime" ago.  Anyone who has ever gone through a divorce knows the challenges and trials that it brings.  It is not easy, in fact it is downright hard, it sucks big time.  In the decade that has passed as a "single" person, much has happened to me.  Some of it has been very bad but an equal part of it has been very good. Through it all, I have learned a most valuable lesson about my life and the lesson learned is this~I now know that I am quite capable of taking very good care of myself on my own.  When money was tight, I took on a second job.  If my vehicle gave me trouble, I took it to the shop and let someone who made their living working on other people's vehicles take a look at it.  I figured out how to make a garden on my own, do maintenance on a lawn mower, and how to run a power drill~all things that I had no clue about as a formerly married woman.  Sad to admit it, but I'll always remember the first time I had to go to Dillon's for  groceries and the realization hit me that I was going to be carrying in all of those sacks by myself.  And you  know, that hit me rather hard.  I can remember shedding a few tears over that very thing but as time went on it got easier.  Of necessity, I stopped being totally reliant on having a man around the house.  And, I dare to say that it was very good for me.  It was a lesson that I needed to learn and even though it hurt sometimes to be alone, I made it and I believe I became a much stronger person because of it.

But even in as self-sufficient as I like to believe that I had become, there was one thing missing~and that one thing was the companionship of someone who would love me, someone who would care about whether or not I came home after work each day. You know, the kind of someone who would be there in the middle of the night when you turned over in bed.   I prayed for such a very long time that God would send a man to me who would love, respect and honour me, and perhaps marry me some day. I had come close to giving up, to believing that there was no one left that He would have in mind for me.  Was I ever wrong! 

Over 600 miles away, in the town of Montrose, Colorado there lived a man who was looking for someone to love and to spend the rest of his days with too.  Perhaps in HIS "wildest of dreams" he would have never imagined that there was a school teacher living in south central Kansas just waiting to find a man like him.  Even more weird would be that he would find someone with a connection to the small Reno County town of Haven, Kansas....the place where both of us went to high school. But stranger things happen in this life~And when Mike and I finally found the way to make the "connection" with one another, we both pretty much realized that what had happened was not a coincidence, but rather a part of a "mysterious" plan for life.  Do we look for things to be easy and carefree?  Nah, probably not and any more I'm not sure that I'd want things to be totally easy in the first place.  The challenges, the "bumps in the road" that we are sure to encounter in the days and weeks ahead will serve to "refine" our character and I believe make us even stronger people than we are now.  Much remains to be seen but this I know~we will just hold hands and go through it together.  Not sure I could ask for anything more than that and come to think of it, I won't.

In the weeks that remain between now and the end of May, there's a lot to do with many "loose ends" to tie up before I move to Colorado.  My plate is a little on the full and overwhelming side but it's ok and I know I will make it.  The very last thing we will do here in the flatlands of Kansas is to be married and believe it or not, our wedding will be in a rather unique and unorthodox setting.  With our family members  joining us, on the very last day of school, 20 minutes after the last bell has rang for the year, we will be married in the gym of Lincoln Elementary.  I want for my friends here at school and the students that I have taught to be in attendance.  You know, when you spend 8 hours of your "waking day" with the same group of people, day in and day out....well, you get kinda close to them and they become your family in a different and special sense of the word.   When I walk out the door for the very last time as a teacher, my life will have definitely been changed for the "good".  I will thank God for that, every single day.  My life may not have turned out exactly as I thought it might, but it DID turn out the way it was supposed to all along.  Looking back, don't think I would have really changed a thing.  

The first day of my first journey here to the Western Slopes.  We went to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison that afternoon.  Maybe we knew it already that very first day...