Jackie Moad

The Hiatus & The Honey-Do List

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I have travelled around the world, twice, clockwise and counter clockwise, taking a year off each time to do it, with Laurie of course. I’ve met Petra Kelly, the Dali Lama and Mother Teresa. I was a founding member of Haven House in Nanaimo. Now I have a beautiful 20 acre organic farm in Cedar, where I work and play all day long in the fruit orchards and vegetable gardens, with my collies and farm animals, wondering all the while, how did I ever managed to work as an RN before retiring in 2017.

The new year is well on it’s way…once again. 2021 was a lightning-quick one for me. The summer? Zipped right by. Writing was on hiatus – no time to wax the eloquent. Most of the farm production,  plant-pick-preserve, was thankfully in the capable hands of a very good man and companion.

My focus was on the Honey-Do List (and still is!).

An explanation: It all started a few months after Laurie’s sudden passing, four years ago. He was an organized man, a list man and we both found great pleasure in figuring out retirement plans.

You know, after we were mortgage-free and before we did our 3rd and final world trip (pole to pole). Yes, BIG retirement plans, periodically updated, the file folder growing fatter with each new farmhouse fix-up item.

What I never knew was that Laurie was also making another list, a secret list, a list of fanciful things I would have mentioned just in passing.

Like ‘I love those wrought iron gates’ or ‘I’ve always dreamt of a wrap-around porch’ or ‘wouldn’t  a spiral staircase be awesome’, and on and on as I dreamed aloud.

Little did I know that each time I shared a fantasy he would secretly jot it down on a sticky note and slip it into his filing cabinet.

Laurie never got to retire; he died less than a month after he turned 64. But he had already surprised me with that wrought iron gate (although there was no time to install it), and the spiral staircase too, but we hadn’t decided where it would be erected.

In the blink of an eye he was gone.

It was four months later that I found our retirement plans folder and tucked neatly behind it, filled with yellow sticky notes, another folder echoing my far-out fantasy items.

And that’s when it started. I phoned West Coast Gates and those wrought iron gates were put in first and the best part – they operate on solar power.

Oh so perfectly appropriate if you knew Laurie.

The pain in my heart seemed to lift a bit. I suddenly felt that this just might be a way, my way, of ‘carry on’, working through that overwhelming sadness and abject grief. All those wee notes and our retirement plans became the Honey-Do List.

It took a while to organize, kind of triaging the dreams, and each project has a history, a story behind it, complete with before n’ after pictures too.

But now another year is upon us and the List, which was put aside during those freezing snowy months is once again begging for the return of Tony the carpenter!

My resolutions for 2022? To slow down a bit, smell the roses more, write some stories. Sure thing. But it’s spring, and those roses have to be pruned first, as do the fruit trees.

But I have a plan, as I look at the Honey-Do List … all the while pondering on the wise words of Dr. Suess: Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

 

Jackie Moad.
World Traveler.
Environmentalist.
Organic Farmer.

 

 

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