To Helen and Back.

The road to Helen is long, smooth, bumpy, twisting, and straight. It dips and turns, and rises toward the sun--or is it the moon?. At the end, it is high, and you can feel like you're on the top of the world. Things there are planned to keep you happy, you'd like to stay there forever. But good things almost always end. You must go down again. And going back from Helen in the dark can be terrifying, knowing that in the blackness at the side of the road, where your headlights don't penetrate, that are chasms, and rivers, and rocks, and ,cliffs. So close, the road so narrow -- what if...?

My wife, Lynn , had forgotten her meds, again, and had blasted off on me about selling our home, and going on the road as Activities Managers for campgrounds. She screamed at me "I begged you not to sell the House, I begged you not to buy this old relic you call a motorhome. It's no home, I can't entertain, I can't see my friends. You don't care about me. Let me leave, just keep me on your insurance, and you can go do as you damn please."

That last bit really hurt. I couldn't stop her from leaving if I wanted to, she had her own money, actually more than I did. I didn't want her to leave. Life was not fun before I met her. When she was not off her meds, she was still more fun than any one I'd ever met. She's the one that got us traveling (she didn't have to do much convincing.).

I tried to reason with her, as I had done before. "Look, Lynn, you were with me when we picked out the motorhome, you liked the layout, it was what we could afford. You had to sign all the papers with me. The old house was falling down around our ears, It had major foundation problems., We had to evacuate for every hurricane that came within 200 miles. You were with me and signed all the paperwork." I might as well as kept my mouth shut, for all the good logic did. She never listened, or payed attention, when I said I was willing to look into having a good home base where we could do the things she missed.

We had reservations that night to what we thought was a story-telling contest in a small village near Helen, some fifty miles from where our motorhome was parked.

TO BECONTINUED