The night Grace died, after the morticians and everyone else had gone, I sat down on the sofa and texted my dear friend Frank. It was 4:45 AM, but Frank prefers the night shift at the hospital and would be home by a quarter to seven Central time. He must’ve not worked that evening, but replied the next day, and he and Olivia quickly decided to come up and visit as soon as they could make it work; they arrived two Saturdays ago, the 22nd, and left last Saturday, the 29th. Their presence was an amazing comfort to me; I’ve known Frank since 1984 and Olivia since 1990, and in addition to being my dearest friends along with Grace, they loved her too and so the three of us were able to comfort each other. There was another reason they came to visit: they are planning to move here as soon as it’s feasible.
This is not a new idea for us; Olivia has been interested in moving to the Pacific Northwest for as long as I’ve known her, and after I bought Sunset in 2017 we started tentatively planning how to make it happen. Frank didn’t have any special attraction to the PNW, but he wants out of Louisiana, wants to make his wife happy, and wants to live near me as much as I want to live near them. All of my life, I’ve dreamed of having the people I love most within walking distance; it’s part of the reason I bought a big piece of land, so I could carve out homesteads for friends who want them. And it’s also part of the reason I added a wing to my house: so friends could stay while working on establishing their own homes. Once the annex was mostly done at the beginning of ’23, I officially invited them to move. But as Grace’s health declined I had less time to devote to anything else, so we didn’t really start making any concrete plans until now.
That it took over 18 years after I left Louisiana for good to get this ball rolling illustrates what I think has been one of my lifelong worst failings: the tendency to live in the future rather than the present, to repeatedly say to myself, “I’ll start working on x as soon as I’ve accomplished y“. Now, this isn’t an unusual shortcoming; if anything, I’d say it was only second to its opposite, repeatedly leaping without looking. But our time on this plane is so short, deferring important goals for too long eats up a lot of the time one would otherwise have to enjoy them. Grace delayed building herself a trike, something she’d wanted to do since she became too infirm to safely ride her motorcycle any longer, until she felt well enough to do so; alas, that time never came, but it isn’t something she could’ve readily circumvented, either. Given the logistics, I’m unsure if it would’ve made much difference had we started actively working on Frank and Olivia’s move soon after I bought Sunset, or at least immediately after finishing the addition two years ago. But perhaps it would’ve at least given them one last visit with Grace before she was taken from us.
