Ken - The Dreammaker

Nothing has changed since my last post, but I wanted to try to get back to the happy things in my life and not let one bad problem stop me from dreaming.

I want to write about the past 10 years since I met and feel in love with Ken.  This is not your typical love story.  For one thing if you put me in a room full of men, Ken would have been the last one I would have been paired up with.  I guess we proved that opposites do attract. 

The story begins with two computers - mine and his.  He saw my name and profile on a singles website and sent me an email.  I replied back and he told me he and his son were leaving on a cruise and that he would email me when they returned to Chicago.  I got busy at work and at home.  It was the end of January and I had to mess with the snow since I lived alone and other winter chores.  I dawned on me after the second week of February that I had not heard back and they should have returned by then.  I sent him a "Hey how are you" email and he wrote back.  He was afraid that I was not interested in hearing back from him.  He ended up calling and we talked for almost 2 hours.  He said he had never carried on a conversation for that length of time with anyone.  Now that he has been married to me for 8 years, he knows talking is not a problem with me.  It was almost Valentine's Day and he thought he would be smart and look up my address on the computer and send me a present.  He called on Feb. 13 to see if I had received it and I said no.  Come to find out the address that showed up on the computer was for my ex-husband's home.  I called him up and explained what had happened and I drove right over to pick it up off his porch.  It was about 11:00 at night by then.  It was a cute bear and candy. 

A few weeks later he drove down and we got to meet each other.  This is a picture of us around that time taken at my home.  He was retired and I was working as an accounts payable clerk.  It was a 2 hour drive from his place to mine and I even learn to drive on the interstate.  From the very beginning he taught me that I could do almost anything if I wanted it bad enough.  I even went to the community college here and took a class to learn to play golf because he loved it.  I had always watched it on TV but never thought I would ever go out and play it.  I loved it and felt really good about myself.  I talked to him about things I wanted to do with my house that I had lived in for about 30 years.  The main thing was to clear out the basement of all the stuff my ex had brought in from garage sales, boxes of comic books and miscellaneous collectibles, and a lot of my sewing supplies.  We started having garage sales on the weekends trying to clear it out.  There was 5 rooms down there and he got them all cleaned out, painted the walls and floor and made it into a presentable place to use.  Then he gutted my kitchen, put in new cabinets, cut out a pantry over the basement stairs, and since he was an electrician by trade, fixed all my electrical outlets. 

All during this first year, he talked about moving to an island and I said I would be open to doing something like that.  I told him I would never consider selling my home unless we were married.  About that time my job was eliminated and I was laid off.  I was retired from working as a secretary at Illinois Power Company plus I had started getting Soc. Sec. that year plus unemployment for 7 months.  He asked me to marry him in August of 2003.  We put my house up for sale in September and went to St. Croix to look for a place to buy to move there.  We found the perfect condo with a great view and signed the papers.  We were married in October and he left for the island after shipping his car there.  My house sold in October, I packed everything up, the movers came and I was on the island the first of November.  It could not have worked out any better.

Here is a picture of our view from the upstairs balcony.  We also had a patio and a grassy area from our downstairs.

The buildings are in Christiansted.  Our condo is up on a hill.  I told him it was the only place we had seen that I really wanted to live in.  It had a atrium up the center of it with a glass roof and that was my sewing area.  You could look down from the upstairs.  We were there for 5 years and loved the experience.  We took 3 cruises out of Porto Rico which was about a 30 minute flight from St. Croix.  I came back to Illinois for 2-3 weeks for special occasions - my son graduating from college, my granddaughter graduating from high school, summers, and once to have my knee replaced.  Ken did not come back as often as I did but he did come back the summer I had my knee done and we were here for about a month.  After we went back to St. Croix he started talking about coming back since we had really done everything we wanted and found that we spent most of our time at the condo.  He got on the computer and started looking at houses back where I lived (Decatur, IL) and he jokingly said how about this one.  I looked at the floor plan and the pictures and I was sold.  It grew on him as the days went by and nothing else could compare to it in our eyes.  My daughter and her husband had the realtor show them the house and they took over 100 pictures and said they thought it was great.  We put in an offer, put the condo up for sale, and a man from Montana bought it without seeing it- just like we did our home. 

I love all the memories of the island life and once again it was something I never dreamed would happen to me.  Now we are living in this old house that I never thought I would be luck enough to have.

We have worked hard side by side putting in flower beds, garden, fruit trees, painting, etc. and have made it our home.  We have done some crazy things together and he has gotten me to help him carry in so much stuff that I never thought the two of us could handle.  The worse was a 120 gallon fish tank and oak stand.  I learn that where there was a will, there was a way and he would come up with it.  He truly is my sole mate, best friend, and husband.  He has a cruise planned for us and booked for a year from now.  We are going to have a great time.

Dream do come true.