Like Alice Down The Rabbit Hole
I thought the title of this blog would give you a good sense of how I ended up in Kentucky. My husband found out about five years ago that his dad had brain cancer. He was given six months to live. Christian tried very hard to help care for his father in Kentucky, and his family in Ohio. Christian did a lot of driving back and forth, and a few times took FMLA from work. Garry his father, has brain surgery and started chemo. Now Garry was born here, and spent a lot of childhood here. He loved it here, he was also what you might call a hippy. When Garry had his brain surgery he was more upset about them cutting off his long hair than he was about the surgery. He was also an avid pot smoker, which I believe was the reason he lived so much longer than the doctors expected. But after about three years, his condition did start to get worse. Christian felt compelled to leave Ohio and come take care of his father. His dad refused to leave Kentucky to come stay with us.
So Christian quit his job and left for Kentucky, about a month later I followed him down. We have always lived paycheck to paycheck. So we didn't have any big savings account to fall back on. So while we looked for a place we stayed in a camper at his dad's place. A very small camper. We all just pretend we were on a camping trip. We ran an extension cord to the camper from his dad's house, so we could have electric. His dad had very few modern conveniences. He had electric and a phone, he only had those because Christian's ex wife required he have at least that for Crystal his granddaughter to visit.
Most of the time we cooked on an open fire, there was also a two burner propane stove in the camper. We saved the propane and used the burners to heat the camper. Some how we also ended up having my husbands friend staying with us, misery loves company. So we had four adults and two dogs living in this thing. Christian and I slept on the double bed, Dj on the single, and Tim was on the floor. Needless to say Tim got stepped on a lot. We took showers at Christian's mamaws house, who lived about 4 miles down the road. We filled empty milk jugs with water to bring back to the camper, for cooking and cleaning.
After about a month of this we finally found a place. It was in bad shape when we moved in. It took a month of cleaning and painting before we could bring our things down from Ohio. A couple of months later Christian's daughter Crystal moved in with us. In the spring of 2009 Garry got really bad. He could hardly walk, he was falling alot, and he got staph. He ended up in the hospital for a week. We had been trying to get him to leave his home and come stay with us and he refused. While he was in the hospital a good friend of his helped Christian add a room onto our house. As hard as it was Christian had to make his father come here. In October of 2009 Garry passed away after a long hard battle with cancer. He is deeply missed, and the world lost a very kind soul.
Our plan had been to go back to Ohio after Garry passed. We hadn't planned on Christian's daughter Crystal moving in with us. She is in high school, and it wouldn't be fair to yank her up away from her home. So now you know why we came here, and why we stay. The plan now is to leave in two years when his daughter graduates high school. But life is what happens while your busy making plans.