A No-Shit Idyllic Moment

[ThomWV]

I just had one, no kidding. I just had a picture-book, never-gonna-happen-again moment.

Background:

I'm 58, recently retired, we live way out in in the country. For the first time in our lives my wife and I are financially secure (paid off all debt at retirement and still have a comfortable nest egg) with a modest but sustaining pension. My health, which has always been good, has done nothing but improve since I left Government employ in January. My waist size is down 2 inches and I am tanned.

Our home is a dump, poorly built sometime in the 30's and no going through major repair. My wife and I are doing the work and trying to keep the cost down as far as reasonable. Hence the tan.

This morning was spent setting stone on the wall of a storage building we are in the process of restoring. By noon it had warmed up considerably so I quit. It was what we call a 3-bag day, 1 "bag" referring to an 80-pound sack of mortor mix. Good enough.

I cleaned up and decided to take a little walk up the hill to a small pond that is on our property. The pond is a leftover from an old strip mine operation but it had good water. I stocked it myself about 10 years ago and now it is just full of fish. Local kids fish there, I keep it mowed. Its back in the woods, in the hills.

So I was up there near the pond and 2 of our dogs were with me. Penelope, the oldest and only female of our pack, and the young dog who hasn't got a name represent the two ends of the Labrador spectrum. She is a soft hair pointy-nose, which means she is over weight. He is a coarse hair block-head. He'll be thin and muscular. He is a water dog.

As I entered the clearing by the pond on this clear and sunny afternoon a fresh warm breeze blew up. The trees were cloaked in the brilliant green that you only get to see in week-old leaves and at that very moment I knew I was living the single best instant of my life. You can not believe how much I have to be thankful for.

Thom
West Virginia

[dbonds]

1. /envy

[Spacemom]

2. Beautiful

You're a lucky man.

[bleedingheart]

3. thanks for sharing!

sounds perfect to me!

[hickman1937]

4. And then you raced back to post at DU.

The best of all worlds. Thanks for sharing that, I envy you.

[bertha katzenengel]

5. no shit

That's lovely Thom. Thanks. (Mrs. V. and I had a similar one last weekend, when we saw a gray fox marking our back yard, then chasing off one of our feral cats. We figure she must have a den or has made a nest in some dense undergrowth on one portion of our back yard. Heaven on earth.)