About a year ago, as I watched the terrible winter storm rage outside my windows, I turned to my husband and declared: "Kern, if I go ahead and plant that orchard we are planning on putting in, we are NEVER moving again. I plan to eat the fruits I grow far into the future. Look outside and tell me if you want to live here for the rest of your life." (Timing is everything!) He pondered the snow and ice coming down outside, and very quickly came to the same decision I had made. We were DONE with cold, terrible winters and it was time for a change. We called our children to us and let them know we were moving. This Summer. They come to pow-wow with us, and my sweet Son-in-Law said "Well, where are we moving to?" YES!!! We wouldn't have to leave our grandson and children behind! Their love and commitment to us and our family is humbling and excruciatingly precious to me.
We had the opportunity to go anywhere we wanted. Anywhere. The only requirement for us was that we were near a city with a wheelchair basketball team that Anika could play on. We quickly came to the conclusion that we wanted to move to Texas. Dallas has a fabulous wheelchair basketball program, so we needed to try to stay somewhat close to the city, but not TOO close. With that decision made, we scrambled to put our Indiana home on the market. Kern went to his boss and informed her that we were moving, and he would be able to do his job remotely, AND SHE DIDN'T EVEN BLINK... It was a done deal! The house was on the market for 16 days when we accepted an offer. The following weekend, Kern and I headed to Texas to search for a new home! We drug our real estate agent through 24 counties, all the way around the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Our requirements made it a little tough. We wanted some land. Not a huge property, but enough to do some homesteading... perhaps have some livestock, a widely varied fruit orchard, nut trees, water (pond or stream) and an accessible home large enough for ALL of us. After 4 days of searching East and West, North and South, we made an offer on a beautiful home about an hour South-East of Dallas. The price had already been dropped significantly and we were worried the owner wouldn't accept our even-lower offer, but I guess it had been on the market long enough, and the owner wanted to get on with her own relocation, so she counter offered, and we accepted that. We headed back to Indiana to close tie things up there, and returned in the beginning of August to close on our new home. We had done it! We were Texans!!
The first order of business was to get a contractor into the house to make a bathroom and a bedroom accessible and make a few more tweaks for Anika. We got busy getting ourselves settled in our new home, LOVING our new pond that is full of catfish and black bass, wandering our 7 acres and dreaming of the possibilities that we could accomplish here.
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