Jesse and I took three years to move from Colorado to Oregon. We had both retired early (in retrospect, a great decision), because we had the means to, and because we wanted to be nearer to our only child, our daughter, and her children.
But it's just appalling how much junk, how many THINGS a family accumulates living four decades together. We had lived over thirty years in the same house, and I had often joked that if we ever decided to move, I would just burn it down.
When the time actually came, that started to look more and more like an attractive option.
We were spending so much time in Portland that it made financial sense to buy a condo there as an outpost. By that time, we owned our Colorado house outright, so we re-financed it and used the proceeds to just buy the condo outright, but now we had a small mortgage on our old house again.
We started the transition to our new home by boxing up all the non-essential items that we wanted to keep and shipping them to ourselves at the other end. Every time we visited, whenever we could get a little of our daughter's time, we'd get together and open boxes, going through the painful decisions of throwing the stuff away, figuring out a place to keep it in one of our houses, or sometimes just sighing, putting it back in the box, and putting the box back in the mini-storeroom. We did pretty well keeping that to a minimum.
Eventually, we bit the bullet and put our Colorado house on the market, which is a lot of work. Right about then, too, the real estate market tanked. We sold it, but I figure we got maybe $50,000 less for it than if we had sold it two years earlier.
But, we took the long view; we had bought the house for only $55,000 in the first place and had had a great life there for over thirty years. We sold it for six times what we had paid for it, and had the proceeds to help fund our retirement in Oregon.
The "big move" was not really very much at all. We had already fully furnished the condo with things from our Colorado house (and a few new things), so we just gave away or sold all of our furniture except for a couple of items. Same with our clothes ... most of what remained in Colorado went to Goodwill.
When we finally moved into our condo for good, it was the Spring of 2008. We were both getting pretty creaky by then, Jesse more than me. We suffered from middle-class-American-lifestyle syndrome: too much worry, too much sedentary work, too little exercise, too much food. We went on the South Beach diet together and walked a lot, which was a wonderful way to spend time together.
Portland is well-known, and accurately so, for being a wet climate. But Spring and Summer there are actually a lot like Colorado. Hot, dry, lots of sunshine. Don't tell anybody or they'll all want to move here. (Actually I think the word must have leaked out!) Lots more oxygen in the air, though, which we both appreciated.
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Over the years, Jesse and I had gotten in the habit of pointing interesting things out to one another, especially "people-watching" things. If I saw an especially hunky guy and felt that Jesse might miss seeing him for some reason, I'd always poke her in the ribs, lean over near her ear and whisper, "Jesse, look to your left."
She'd swing her head over, trying to look casual about it, and ogle the stud who was passing, then say something to me like, "No George Clooney, but nice. Thanks!" She in her turn had pointed out many good-looking women to me over the years, too. It was a gentle way of actually flirting with each other.
But it wasn't always sexy-looking people. One day, we sere having lunch in a restaurant, and Jesse patted the seat of the empty chair next to her and said, "Jim, why don't you move over and sit here next to me." I was sitting across from her at a four-top table, so I moved our coats and swung into the seat at her side.
"Watch this guy over there by the door!" she said in a whisper.
I glanced that way, trying not to be too obvious. The guy was talking, talking, talking, gesturing grandly with his fork, seeming to lecture his companion, a mousy little woman across from him. I looked at Jesse with a question on my face.
"Just keep watching! Maybe he'll do it again!"
After a few moments, the guy was quiet, and the woman responded, apparently with a question. The guy shrugged and, using his fork, scratched his scalp in thought. He then went on eating as if scratching yourself with table-ware in a restaurant was an everyday occurrence.
I had everything I could do not to do a spit-take and spray my soda all over. I choked, trying to swallow, and the two of us burst into laughter. Suddenly, WE were the focus of attention of all the other patrons.
Another time, and probably my favorite example of how generous Jesse was to me, was once when we were moving a new, heavy doghouse into the backyard for our little spaniel, Rusty. The two of us were struggling to wrestle it between our house and the neighbor's house on one side, which was a rental. Our block backed onto a regional park, so the back yards were visible only to one another, and very private. One of the girls from next door was out sunning on a lounge chair, and said "Hi" to us as we struggled past. We grunted a "Hi" back and went on about our business.
I was sweating like a pig, and had taken off my glasses so they didn't fall off. When we were done, and had the new doghouse all set in place, we went inside to get a drink.
Jesse said "Well, Jim, what did you think of that?"
"What?" I said.
"You didn't SEE that?!" Jesse said.
"No? See what? I wasn't wearing my glasses!"
"Well, put them on, Jim, and poke your head out the door and take a look next door!" Jesse said with a big grin.
I did, only to see that the neighbor girl, a very cute twenty-something blonde, was laying out topless. And the sight was well worth the effort! She saw me looking at her, smiled, and waved. I waved back and reluctantly stepped back inside.
"Wow!" I said to Jesse.
"You're welcome," she said, with a big smile.
The girl next door (sometimes with a girlfriend) sunbathed like that all that summer, and if I was ever in danger of missing it, Jesse always said, "They're at it again, Jim!"
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Sometimes, the amazing sight to see was so obvious that it didn't need to be pointed out. But if we were near whoever it was that was so interesting, or approaching them on the same sidewalk, we would both just keep our peace, then after we were out of earshot, we would just break out laughing, or entertain one another with our thoughts about what we had just seen.
That had happened once when we were out walking as part of our new exercise regimen on our favorite route. Out from the condo, through a couple of neighborhoods, touch base at the Starbuck's in the little mall over there, buy a cup, then walk back.
We generally went out very early in the cool of the morning. Portland is much further north than where we had lived before, and in spite of the onset of daylight savings time seemingly earlier and earlier every year, dawn was getting to be very early indeed. We tried to get out at first light, so we didn't waste a good part of our day sleeping and loafing around. So part of what we saw as we went on our walk was all the working people getting ready for their day – picking up the newspaper off their lawn, setting out the trash, walking the dog, and that sort of thing.
As we passed an apartment complex this particular morning before six a.m., a just stunning young woman came out of the end of the building with a little dog on a leash. The dog was some kind of a terrier, maybe one of those "Jack Russell" ones. I'm not an expert on dog breeds; it was a little dog, and just full of energy.
But the girl was absolutely amazing. She was easily as tall as me, and I'm a little over six feet tall. She looked like maybe she was twenty years old, tops. It was still kind of damp and chilly, so she was wearing a short sort of leather "Eisenhower"-style jacket, a multi-colored striped scarf thrown around her neck, and a cute matching knit hat. But, like kids do, she was also wearing extremely tight and short shorts, the legs of which either didn't exist at all or stopped right at the crease at the top of her thighs. On her legs were a pair of those tall knit socks with multi-colored stripes to match her scarf. The socks came up out of her clogs to the middle of her shapely thighs, leaving a tantalizing strip of flesh between them and the bottom of the shorts. I'd often heard other guys say "Her legs went all the way up," but I never realized until that moment what they meant.
She was just dynamite!
I glanced at Jesse to see if she was aware of this vision yet, only to see Jesse looking at me to be sure I wouldn't miss her, either. Jesse just grinned and raised her eyebrows.
The girl and her dog turned on to our pathway and headed in the same direction as us, maybe fifty feet ahead of us. We were about halfway to the Starbuck's at that point, and we paced her perfectly the whole way there. I'm not ashamed to say that I spent most of that time watching the incredible things that were going on inside of those shorts.
We actually passed her as she was tying up her dog outside the coffee shop, and she got behind us in line inside. The tall girl swiped off her knit hat, and shook her head. Her auburn hair was very short, styled in that crazy, spiky way that looked like it had recently been cut by a stylist with a grudge. Cute as hell.
Jesse glanced at her and smiled, and the girl gave her a 100-watt smile in return, and said "Hi!" in a chipper voice, deep for a girl.
Jesse said, "Hi!" back, and I said, "We were walking behind you on the way over here. Would you be willing to walk back with us, or at least behind us? I need to pay at least a LITTLE attention to where I'm walking!"
The girl blushed, smiled, and just playfully pushed my shoulder away. "Oh, you!" she said, glancing at Jesse, who was just grinning.
