The days, as they say, are dwindling down to a precious few. Sue and I take up residence in our rented cabin in Crawford County next Wednesday, July 1. We’ll be back and forth for a few days until the movers come on the 8th and truck our remaining furniture down to storage in Onalaska. The closing on our Pickerel Lake house is on the 13th. This morning, up early on the way to work one of my last airshifts at WJMC-FM in Rice Lake, I took the above photo of another beautiful sunrise.
As Sue said the other day when we were taking a load of stuff down to the cabin, “I can’t believe this is really happening.” But it is. The journey began when I came home from a trip to my native Grant County, just south of Crawford, in September 2024, which I chronicled in a post: The Lure of the River. I just reread it, and the last line struck me: “The Mississippi will be there when we’re ready.” And now, just over 21 months since I wrote that line, we are.
That trip along the river, when this whole dream of moving to the bluffs started percolating, was just a few months after I spent a few days in the hospital in Marshfield, struggling with a pulmonary embolism on top of a serious case of coccidioidomycosis, a fungal infection commonly known as valley fever. Two years ago today, I was in my last full day at Marshfield Medical Center, in the central Wisconsin city of Marshfield. I was on the mend, and just starting to come to grips with the seriousness of my condition.
Lying in that hospital bed, moving anywhere was the furthest thing from my mind. I was concerned about getting home without the threat of blood clots causing a heart attack or stroke.
Two years before that, the 26th of June in 2022 was a much better day, when Sue and I took our Morkie, Maisie, for a bike ride. Maisie was a month away from her first birthday and had quickly become one of the great joys of our life when we adopted her the previous fall.
Three years before that, our daughter sent us these pics of our grandson, Pax, who was a week or so away from his first birthday.
And three years before that, Sue and I were enjoying a summer day on the deck of our lakefront home, with Sophie the Yorkie, who had less than five years to live, enjoying ice cream, just like we were.
I looked at this pic of Sophie and wondered what Sue and I might’ve thought if we’d had someone tells us that day, “You know, ten years from now you’ll be ready to move away from this place.” I’m sure we would’ve told the prognosticator that they must’ve been smoking something.
Yet, here we are. I firmly believe the Lord is leading us to move down there. Too much has happened to be written off as mere coincidence. And since I long ago acknowledged that God had His hands on us more than three decades ago, bringing two unhappy people together to find new love, I’m very comfortable in letting Him guide us on this new path.
We will miss the glorious sunrises on the lake like this morning’s, and the people we’ve gotten to know here, and our church, and so much more. But as we make more visits down to Crawford County to prepare for the move–another one is coming up next Wednesday–we discover more things to explore and admire down in the beautiful Driftless Area. In fact, Sue and I were just talking about how we can revive our long-running “Sue and Dave” Facebook Live posts, which we did weekly for the last few years of her tenure at her travel agency. We’ll be exploring the Driftless Area, chronicling the many wonderful places and people who are ready to welcome us. We’ll be posting on our respective Facebook pages, so make sure to look us up here and here.
And there’s something else we’re looking forward to: the imminent release of my new book, The Dance We Shared. It’s a story about a man who lost the love of his life twenty years ago, and now has one last chance to win her back. The official Driftless launch will be August 9 at Potosi’s Hub: Pages and Parcels, with an “up north” launch at The Old Bookshop of Rice Lake on August 22. Here’s an alternate version of the cover:
Will Ben find Ronnie again, and will they be able to finish their dance? Stay tuned.
A Strenuous Writer's Life 