Day 188, Year 11: Overwhelmed with Kindness
Date: Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Weather: Beautiful Day, Still Cool, High in the 50’s F
Location: At Home in Evergreen Preserve, Lowell, MA
Yesterday’s log was entitled ‘Thanks and Praises for Friends’ and today we have even more thanks and praises. We are absolutely overwhelmed with the generosity of our friends. This morning while I was reading an email from Lynda offering to continue to help packing up the rest of our belongings on Windbird, we got an email from Heather and Jon Turgeon. They were offering to stop in Little River on their way home from Florida to Vermont and haul our things north for us. Mark and I have spent days trying to figure out how to get all of our belongings from South Carolina to Cape Cod and we just have not been able to come up with a way to do it in the six day window we have between Mark’s treatments. The offer from Heather and Jon felt like a miracle in the making. How could we be so lucky?
You might ask, who are Heather and Jon? The answer to that question takes us back to 2003 when we moved aboard Windbird in Shipyard Quarters Marina in Boston. Actually Shipyard is in Charlestown, across the harbor from Boston proper. I had insisted that we live aboard for a year or two before heading around the world. I wanted to find out if I really could live on a sailboat, so we put everything we owned in storage and moved aboard. It was July and before the end of the month we had met most of the other couples that were living aboard. There were Dick and Claire who lived on their trawler four days a week and on Fridays drove back to their home in North Falmouth on the Cape. Dick was the head of OR at Mass General and had to be at work very early in the morning. So instead of making the pain staking commute from the Cape to Boston, he and Claire, formerly sailors, bought a trawler and lived aboard part-time. Years later it was Dick that got us connected to Mass General when Mark was diagnosed with cancer. We will be forever grateful for his connections and his insistence on getting us connected. Dick and Claire were about our age, but then there was the younger crowd. We met Kevin and Claire who arrived at Shipyard about the same time as we did. Claire was a graduate student at Harvard Medical and she and Kevin bought and moved aboard Merganser to avoid paying the outrageous costs of renting an apartment in Boston. We became friends forever. Kevin is THE Kevin who flew to West Palm Beach in February at a moment’s notice to help us get Windbird to South Carolina. And then there was Heather and Jon who lived aboard Evergreen, their immaculately kept Toshiba. Heather was a research nurse at Mass General and Jon worked in the computer world. When we met them, they had already taken a year’s sabbatical to explore the Caribbean and were hoping to sail around the world one day. Currently they are fulfilling that dream. Recently they had Evergreen shipped from Thailand to Greece and they are home for a short visit with family before returning to the Med and eventually sailing home to New England. Lucky for us, they are in Florida right now visiting with Jon’s parents and during the second week of May they will be driving back to Vermont. Heather said in her email this morning that she read in our log that we might need help getting things from South Carolina to here and she and Jon were offering to haul things in their SUV or haul things in a U-Haul trailer for us. Totally unbelievable.
After getting that email, I started checking the costs of a trailer rental and the possibility of flights to and from Myrtle Beach so we can be there to help. It is all possible, but the hang up is Mark’s situation right now. One day he is fine; the next he is nauseous and weak. I could leave him here alone and fly down to do the packing, but he would feel better going with me. But it is really not something he should be doing right now. When we stay home so he can rest, eat victuals I conjure up for him every couple of hours, and use the infuser with peppermint oil to fight off nausea, he is fine. But when we go out, like we did yesterday to have lunch with friends, or like we did today when we had to go to the hospital for his infusion, he has bouts of nausea and can’t eat as he should. So here’s our dilemma. Should we just stay here and let Lee and Lynda and other friends pack up everything we own on Windbird or we should we fly down for two days and help with the process. Or should I leave Mark here alone and go down to do the packing. My sense of guilt tells me I have to go. But then I talk to Lee and Lynda and Lee convinces me that I really don’t need to do this. They will somehow get everything packed and put into a U-Haul trailer and then Heather and Jon will come pick it up and head north. Just like magic.
Whatever we decide, it is just inconceivable to Mark and to me that friends are willing to do so much for us. We have sailing connections with all these friends, so maybe sailors are just generous people. Or maybe we have just been blessed with wonderful friends. Whatever, we are overwhelmed and grateful with the generous offers of help.
