A Bumpy Detour Full of Wrong Turns

Here I am sitting on my deck on a hot and humid June day feeling frustrated about something I have no control over. It’s more like several things. This spot has always been one of my favorite improvements we made on our house since we moved here 35 years ago. It’s not all shade, but not all sun either so you can enjoy it from early morning to evening. I can’t count the number of morning cups of coffee I’ve had while admiring the plants on and around the deck.Sometimes I go out there just for some quiet solitude.

Yesterday’s rain left a puddle in the basement just hours before prospective buyers arrived to look at our house. Under normal circumstances that would have been annoying. But these aren’t normal circumstances.

It rained almost all day. It was something my flower beds needed, but it came at exactly the wrong time. The weeds will be easier to remove, but I’ll be a muddy mess every time I work in the garden for a while. Not that I mind getting dirty. After all, that’s what gardeners do. We try to create some beauty, and dirt under our fingernails is the cost.

We were having visitors at 4 PM who had never been here before and, more importantly, they were potentially interested in buying our house. I was counting on them being able to walk out on the deck to look at my neatly arranged flowerpots full of colorful annuals, or out into the flower beds where my perennial flowers live and be just a little impressed that it doesn’t look like a weed patch.

Decks and patios are supposed to be inviting and, more importantly, something a potential buyer would admire and imagine themselves sitting out there in the shade on a warm summer day, sipping iced tea or something stronger while being surrounded by a riot of color, butterflies, and bees. That’s the scene I had been hoping to create for the past week. It’s a scene I’ve enjoyed myself many times since we installed the deck.

Then Mother Nature forced one of those unexpected bumpy detours.

When you get almost four inches of rain in a short period of time, it’s difficult to make the water go where you want it to go. Water, with some help from gravity, makes its own path. That natural law created a problem we hadn’t considered while preparing the garden.

Our basement windowsills sit right at ground level, which is probably something we should have addressed a long time ago, but wishes and should-haves are no substitute for doing. The first thing our visitors saw when they walked down into the basement was a puddle of water thanks to runoff finding its way under the windowsill.

I guess I’ll know tomorrow what those prospective buyers thought about that leaky basement window. Probably the worst thing about it is that the solution wouldn’t have been difficult or expensive.

There’s more to this story, but I’ll have to finish it inside the house because I hear another thunderstorm moving in. It’s beginning to feel like Zeus is out to get me.

I started at the end but that’s just how my brain is working today.

The beginning of this story straddles 2025 and now. It began with the unexpected death of my brother in the Spring and I’m still processing that loss. That was less like a Bumpy Detour or wrong turn and more like driving off a cliff.

Later last year my wife was diagnosed in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. We had suspected something wasn’t quite right, but hearing the words spoken aloud made the future feel less certain. I feel grossly unprepared to be a caretaker. I desperately wanted to hear the doctor say “we have a cure for that now”.

I guess we all know something like that can happen to us. I usually lock thoughts like that in a dark corner of my brain, so the idea doesn’t ruin all the great things life is giving me each day. Still, it’s the kind of news that pushes us off the main road and onto one of those dark bumpy detours full of unexpected turns.

Just after Christmas, our sixteen-year-old companion Lily went over the rainbow bridge. That’s a pain that still feels fresh. Every time I look at my recliner, I expect to see her sleeping there.

I was glad to see 2025 in the rearview mirror. I fully expected a better 2026. It wasn’t to be.

January was cold and I used that as an excuse not to walk our other dog very often. The truth is I was exhausted all the time.

At 3:00 AM on January 25, I woke up with a parched mouth. Something felt very wrong. I got up to get a drink, looked in the bathroom mirror, and to my horror my mouth tongue and face were badly swollen.

I remember being driven through a snowstorm to the emergency room after dressing as fast as I’ve ever put on a pair of pants.

Walking into the reception area at the emergency room was the last thing I remembered. The next day I woke up in Indianapolis, sixty miles from my last memory, confused about how I had gotten there.

After a six-day stay they let me out along with a diagnosis of something I’d never heard of: acquired angioedema and acute anemia. They also told me that they suspect some other condition in my body is probably what triggered the angioedema attack

We got home late on the 30th, just a few hours before my 77th birthday. I wasn’t thinking about 77 years. Instead, my mind kept jumping ahead to 80.

I had gotten used to thinking of myself as a senior which isn’t so bad, we get a lot of senior discounts. The only description I could think of for 80 was elderly. It’s weird. I still feel like the same person I was at 30, but looking in the mirror tells me I’m kidding myself.

Then in March I had another angioedema attack but got to the hospital much earlier in the process, and they only wanted to keep me overnight.

Understanding our health challenges my wife and I decided to at least investigate an assisted living community. We toured two and both facilities were nice. I knew the prices would be high, but I was shocked at just how high.

We have lived in our 110-year-old historic home for 35 years. I always thought I’d live here until I wasn’t living. It would be fair to say I’m attached. Honestly though, it has become more than we can comfortably take care of. Our kids knew that long before I was willing to accept it.

After seeing the prices at the assisted living communities, I told my wife we’d be much better off simply selling our big house and buying something smaller, safer, and more manageable. She agreed, our stairs are getting painful for her to climb.

Now comes the hard part. Finding a buyer for this house and finding a smaller, single-story home in a location we like. Once those two happy events happen there is the nightmare of moving. A big house with lots of storage, 55 years of marriage with 35 of those in this house means we have a lot of stuff to sort through.

Yet while facing the work this is going to require, it also feels like starting over in a good way. It feels a little like the excitement we felt when we bought our first home so many years ago.

I’m not telling this story because our circumstances are unique. They’re not. Every family eventually encounters its own collection of detours—illness, loss, aging, difficult decisions, and unexpected changes in plans. The details differ, but the experience is universal. Sooner or later, life nudges all of us off the road we thought we would be traveling. None of us gets a map showing where those turns will appear. We simply keep moving forward, doing our best to navigate the road in front of us.

May the pavement below you be smooth and the detours short.