What's Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander

Hey, y'all.......remember me? It's been so long since I put up a post I feel almost as though I need to reintroduce myself again.

But then, that's silly since I remember YOU. And it's good to see everyone again. So here we go:

Over the years as I've dealt with my disease, I've learned the importance of simplifying just about everything: my clothing, my bathing routine, my cooking, and anything else that could potentially sap precious energy. And as is so often the case, when one person in a marriage has a chronic illness and streamlines his or her responsibilities, the other spouse is left holding the bag with all those duties that are difficult for a chronically ill person to accomplish. Which has been abundantly obvious here at our house.

Yep. John has shouldered more than his share of the tasks around here including bringing home the bacon and caring for our home. And lately, it seems that caring for everything has consumed nearly all of his time and also HIS energy.

Not good. The man ends each day absolutely exhausted which simply can't be good for him.

It just wouldn't be fair if John risked his health to assist with mine. So we decided that we needed to apply the same principles of simplification and streamlining to preserve his energy as well. One of the choices that we made with our goal of reducing the amount of time and energy required to keep our house and yard up was to sell part of our property.

[Insert our shocked kids and friends exclaiming, WHAT?! here.]

Our home was built on two good sized city lots and it was wonderful when the kids were young. I was healthy, and we all had more time and energy to maintain that great big chunk of trees and grass.

But now,  the kids have homes of their own and aren't around to provide slave labor cheerful assistance anymore which leaves John to shoulder it all. We thought about hiring a lawn service to take care of everything, but then decided that the expense just wasn't worth it. Especially when we realized that by selling the lot, we would see an excellent return on our investment in the lot purchased so long ago.

We accepted an offer and will close on the sale in just ten days. It will be a bittersweet day: we have such fun memories of all the shenanigans that took place back there but then..............Woo hoo! No more endless pruning and mowing and hauling compost and spraying and........! Of course there's the cha-CHING factor which helps a great deal as well.

We have left ourselves plenty of space which has just the right amount of grass and flowers and trees with room to add more.

It will be fun to transform our original lot into a new back yard. I'll keep y'all posted.