2006 - Her Own Course but Together Trips; Canyons and Basketball; UK and France; A French Love and Noah’s Wedding; New Smyrna Lost
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A bittersweet but financially prudent decision, four hurricanes in four years caused more and more damage, and the real estate taxes exceeded the mortgage payment. Paul sold the Florida house, providing a cushion to work more selectively, and helping pay off Conifer home while also initially fund Linda’s own home purchase in Morrison. It made it possible to consider a few different kinds of excursions together.
They continued sharing journeys. Into the Grand Canyon on rafts once again. And to B-ball tourneys!
A few details about each follow.
In 2006 they embarked on another rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. The entire experience can be justifiably described as a series of “highlights”, but one place was new to them, and one day was never to be forgotten.
The Canyon is a desert. It does rain there, but not much, not frequently. Signs of erosion have sculpted the landforms into the stepped terraces amid vertical cliffs known almost instantly upon sight worldwide as the Grand Canyon.
The land everywhere appears an endless sequence of landslides, dry falls, side-canyon stream courses with massive boulders, difficult to imagine as ever having been moved, much less a torrent of the magnitude to toss these massive slabs willy-nilly about the canyon bottoms. Yet, with all these clear manifestations of erosion and change, the canyon seems eternal, unchanging, the land-carving done millennia before, geologic epochs ago.
Not so.
One morning brought heavy clouds, then a deluge that obscured the canyon rims with mist and cloud curtains. A hundred waterfalls burst into existence in minutes. Pouring off every cliff edge, down small draws which became raging torrents, the deluge caused a massive landslide across from camp, reshaping the face of the canyon while they watched.
No, the canyon has dynamism despite appearances and emotions, and watching even a part of it reshaped felt like observing creation in motion.
They observed. They abided. They shared and they remembered.
Noah moved to London, did well, and had Paul come for a final right-of-passage to address not wide but deep father-son dynamics. On All Hallows Eve in an abandoned castle in Wales they held an initiation, a simple release into Noah’s own glory and adulthood. Noah and Linda did and experienced much of the same a few years later in the same location, Linda glowing in Noah’s assurance he would be there for, care for her no matter what. After the divorce with Paul, those were life-determining concerns for her.
They met Noah’s to-be wife. Several years later, the couple married in London. Linda’s entire family including Jared traveled to share in the joy of the couple’s friends who gathered for the legal seal of their marriage by the dour barrister, but everyone else rejoicing.
While the couple went on honeymoon in the Pyrenees, Linda, Paul, and Alia utilized the opportunity to travel to Scotland and the UK. Across England to Stonehenge while visitors could still stroll inside the circle of stones, up to Scotland, to castles and moors; Linda’s archaeological and classical civilization love sprouted like a mountain rose. Coming across a grove of Redwoods and the wild ruggedness of the Highlands and the north coast, her primal nature spirit also rejoiced.
It was good.
