Day 17, Year 10: Forty Years—Who Would Have Thought
Date: Monday, October 27, 2014
Weather: Another Beautiful Day, High in the Upper 70’s
Location: R Dock, Lightkeepers Marina, Little River, SC
It was Sunday morning with the sun rising over Lover’s Key on the Gulf Coast of Florida when Mark and I were married on October 27, 1974. Mark slipped a cheap Mexican silver ring in the shape of daisy on my finger and I clasped a macramé and shell necklace around his neck. We had both been married before. I had actually been married twice, each time for less than a year. So I was pretty sure this marriage thing wasn’t for me. But here we are, two wonderful children and five beautiful grandchildren later, even happier now than we were on that Sunday morning so many years ago. We’ve built a dream cabin in the mountains, tried farming in Minnesota while racing sled dogs to keep the winters from driving us crazy, built a log home on a 40-acre farm in southern West Virginia, built a public radio station from the ground up and grew another state network from one station to many, eventually becoming NPR Board Chair (Mark, not me), taught children of all ages, but settled on first graders because of the magic that happens to children during that year (me, not Mark), and spent six wonderful years sailing around the globe aboard our beloved Windbird. On that Sunday morning in 1974, who would have thought? Mark Handley—We have had one wonderful life together. Thank you for dragging me along on all of your dream adventures. I went kicking and screaming and then loved each one more than the last.
We met with the oncologist here today and found out the schedule of Mark’s cancer treatments for the next few weeks. We now have a much better idea of a time table and can start planning this winter’s adventure in earnest. Mark will have his next chemo treatment tomorrow and then the last of this series right before Thanksgiving. By December 9 he will have had a scan and will meet with the doctor on that day to decide what the next regimen will be. But whatever, we should be able to leave here to head further south by mid-December. On our way home from the meeting with the doctor we stopped at a Columbia Sports outlet store to buy SPF 50 shirts for Mark. Regular cotton shirts give you about the equivalent of SPF 15, but the new high-tech materials give much greater protection. We then stopped by my sister’s house before heading out to dinner with friends Lee and Lynda Kaufman. There were a dozen yellow roses from Mark waiting for me at Patsy and Joe’s and a beautiful anniversary cake for us from Patsy and Joe. My niece Jennifer is still here and she gave us the most beautiful card. We then went out to dinner at a restaurant called The Flying Fish and had fresh mahi mahi fixed Cajun style and went back to Patsy and Joe’s for dessert. The anniversary cake was as good as it looked. Yummy!
Since tomorrow is a chemo infusion afternoon we’ll probably not get to work on Patsy and Joe’s back deck again until Wednesday. But we have lots of little jobs that need to be done here on Windbird, so we’ll stay home in the morning and work on those. The rest of this week is supposed to be warm and beautiful, with maybe a bit of rain on Thursday. But come Saturday, the north winds start blowing and our daytime and nighttime temps are going to drop by about 15 to 20 degrees. We’ll need to batten down the hatches and get ready for a couple of days of cool weather. But better a couple of cool ones rather than all of them cool.
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| 141027 Day 17 Little River, SC–40th Anniversary |
