Life in the Slow Lane

Since Brad retired for the final time in 2018 we have become rather spoiled to having a lot of time to spend together and it just never gets old. Over the years I’ve heard the comments and the questions, you know…the ‘how can you stand having him underfoot all the time’ sort of things that other women my age with retired husband seem to spout. I just smile and tell them we are making up for all that time spent apart when he worked long hours in law enforcement, being on call when he was head of CID for several years, and then became the Director of the Texoma Regional Police Academy.

We don’t miss the middle of the night phone calls or the missed meals we had planned. We seem to be a rare breed in that we actually enjoy spending time together. We were teenagers when we met and I was twenty and he was twenty-two when we married. I’m sixty-six and he’s sixty-eight now and we don’t get tired of spending time together.

We still have plenty of alone time and we both enjoy reading and puttering around on our laptops. He has meetings and errands as do I and on occasion one or the other of us is gone the better part of a day for one thing or another but we usually have evenings and meals together.

Right now it’s 2:00 pm on Sunday, Mother’s Day, and we have the house open and are enjoying the breeze blowing through the house. We’ve got Animal Planet on and are watching reruns of Lone Star Law. Brad knows several of the guys we see on the show and he’s always sharing little stories about being around them and the conversations they’ve had.

He’s dozing on and off in his recliner. He had rotator cuff surgery on his left shoulder last week. Thankfully it wasn’t as bad as the right shoulder a couple of years ago and he will have a much quicker healing and be ready for a much shorter rehab very soon. He sees the surgeon in a couple of days and we’ll find out how soon he can start rehab with our favorite PT guy. I got acquainted with Dr. Bourne in 2016 when I trashed my left ankle. Then Brad got to know him really well in 2019 while going through PT on his right shoulder.

It will be good when Brad is able to get over to the gun range on the back side of our property and enjoy doing some target shooting again. He has his shop building, his Man Cave where he can clean and work on his firearms and do a little reloading from time to time. We’ve got a new A/C unit in that building now so he is all set for hot weather in a couple of months.

This is his Man Cave a hundred yards or so east of the house where he can enjoy some alone time and putter around. The roof was replaced in 2015 when we had the roof on the house replaced. It’s time to repaint and we need to reseal the front porch deck on the house. Now that the big pine trees are gone from the north side of the house we have room to add a fair sized deck on the north side of the garage where we could have a table and some chairs and maybe a charcoal grill for cooking outdoors.

I’ll run in to town later and pick up a few things at the grocery store and grab us some burgers from Whataburger on the way home. For now we will enjoy Lone Star Law reruns and fresh air blowing through the house, maybe nap in our recliners. Yep. Life in the slow lane is such a blessing.