Because We Can - Fulltime RV'ing

 

Life is not a Dress Rehearsal

 

At the bottom of each page on our website is the following: Life is not a dress rehearsal, Don't be afraid to laugh, love and retire early.

Perhaps we should add another line to it, one that would read, "If I only knew then what I know now, I'd have done things differently."

That's not a way of bragging about our Life, nor is it a lament that our life is lacking. What it is, is a reference to the reality that one day confronts each and every one of us: Should we take a chance on that. Do I go for it now or wait. Why couldn't I have been as lucky as him, her or they. It's okay, someday I'll....

Recently we bought an RV lot at Retama Village in Mission, Texas for a very simple reason, we saw it. Linda, bless her heart, is a great deal more perceptive about some things than I am. The changing waves of existence that can either caress or pound the shores of our Life are one of the things to which she is acutely attuned. Me, an insensitive, big picture person. Linda, intimately connected to the world and it's vibrations.

Two of Linda's favorite sayings, actually words she lives by, are: "Things happen for a reason" and "We'll know it when we see it." While I'm looking for what's coming next, she's taught me to look back at some incident and see it for what it really was in the light of our whole Life we have yet to live.

We hadn't actually been looking for a someplace to set over the winter, but we had been looking when we were in places. Knowing that when we saw it, but without knowing what or where it was, we would know that was it. Retama, turned out, was it. Not a place to spend each and every minute of each and every winter, and not a mere whim of the moment, yet I can't explain why we bought it from a rational point of view.

It has beautiful tree lined lots in the older section of the Village, yet we bought an undeveloped lot in a new section. People say you don't want to live near the border with Mexico, yet we bought within a few miles of the border in an area where there is no "fence" and open land between us and that same border with a drug war ravaged Mexican city just across it. Why tie yourselves down to one location, yet many of the lots are not owner occupied but rather they are rented out for the winter season. What if you don't like it there, yet there is a thriving resale market for these lots.

It is for "active adults", it has a large clubhouse, it has a mixture of residential types, it is part of a larger planned development, it has a homeowners association and the attendant fees, it is more expensive than most of these types of developments in the Valley. What's to like or not to like about it can go on, just as many people's opinions of Retama do. Including why would anyone ever buy there, or why would you do such a thing. None of which matters actually, because a long time ago when my younger brother died in Vietnam I realized that life is not a dress rehearsal.

Link to Retama for anyone that's curious about it.

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