Dan and Vicky forever…..”a worn red chair by the window”

It would seem like our life at Nuestra Casa and our mountain cabin are like night and day.  

For the past six months we have lived in our home in Leisure World—“an active adult community.”  In other words—a group of “active” senior citizens who live behind walls in a gated community, with 42 pages of rules, two 18-hole golf courses, 2 full-sized pools, tennis, basketball, and pickleball courts, lawn bowling, two ballrooms, ping pong, bingo, pool rooms, and every imaginable club, including crafts, woodworking, political, and so much more.  There are organized outings and week-long trips, exercise classes of all kinds.  The list of offered and possible activities goes on and on.

And then there is Pine, Arizona….a mish mash of homes and people with no two alike.  There seems to be NO rules—it’s a free for all.

The surprising thing is that, although Nuestra Casa and our cabin are totally different, we love living at each of them equally.  They seem to compliment each other—to add spice to our life.

Although each home is a different environment, we do pretty much the same thing at each home….we cycle, walk, hike, play ping pong, and we dance, dance, dance.  We spend every second of every day and night together….all by ourselves, except for the special times when our family comes to visit us.  

Our homes are different, but we are true to ourselves and our love.  We are Dan and Vicky forever.

This has been our first wonderful week this summer at our mountain cabin…..it started with Thanksgiving in April at the cabin!

I had frozen several of our Thanksgiving meals, and had saved the last one for our first “summer” night at our cabin.  

We ate Thanksgiving Dinner in April on our back deck where we admired my new Valentine’s Day lot and the view of the Mogollon Rim in the distance.

This is our second summer at the cabin.  The cabin is much smaller than Nuestra Casa, and we have a TON of  “stuff” for all of our sports activities and hobbies.  So we decided to spend a few days organizing all this gear.

We used about half the space that we did last summer, when we we’re constantly frustrated and looking for a necessary item.  Everything is now all visible and easily accessible.  

The walk-in storeroom (aka spare bedroom/activity room).

The barn (aka shed).

Now that our “work” was done, it was time to play!

We cycled all around Pine and visited all of our favorite spots.  It was a blast!

Up to Mogollon Rim, we just had to go…for our first hike of the summer.  There was still some snow at 7500 feet elevation!

There was a gorgeous view looking northeast towards the hundreds of miles of hiking on the rim plateau that stretches to Flagstaff and beyond!

We spent a day walking in our neighborhood in Pine—Cool Pines.  We saw lots of our neighbors sleeping under the trees.

And we finally found “a worn red chair by the window that we found at a sale down the way….”

This chair on the left of the photo above is something that we have been looking for ever since we bought our cabin.  It is a necessity for us to have a “worn red chair by the window.”  This phrase comes from the song that represents how we feel about the cabin—Ripplin’ Waters, by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.  

Here is our “worn red chair by the window” in our cabin.

And we danced in each other’s arms on the deck of our cabin to Ripplin’ Waters.

What a memorable first week for our second summer together at our mountain cabin!