The Dark Winter
It has been a long winter. We had some fun, but it seemed as though there was more sadness each month. With all of the hardships the cold season can bring, it’s hard to get all of them out in writing. We are, and have been, trying to focus on and think positively about the new spring and summer to come…
When we were finally able to get our camper up and running again, there were some worries, luckily all of them were not very well founded. Caleb was mostly concerned with moving our slides after practically four months locked in one place! It has been very nice having all of our windows again, we think Henry missed them the most. He’s become our little bed bug who spends most of his afternoon’s all snuggled into the blankets and just loves having the bedroom windows open again so he can watch birds from his favorite spot! Hope just loves not being as cold as she probably was. She started having the hobby of sleeping in front of the heater vent and blocking most of the heat from us! Now she has warm, sunny windows to lounge in front of…oh to be a cat!
While we didn’t face any physical struggles, like our water lines freezing, or other mishaps, we experienced plenty of mental burdens. It is hard to deliver such bad news over a blog post, but the tragedies I speak of are two of our close family members passing away. In January -during our trip to Florida for my birthday- we got a call that nobody likes to get. Roger, our sweet bunny, had passed in his sleep.
This was the day before my birthday and we were getting ready to walk out the door when my mom called Caleb (she didn’t want me finding out over the phone, I’m a little more sensitive to things than he is). Growing up with similar events happening more than anybody should have to go through, I knew immediately by the tone of their voices and the look on his face that someone had died. I cried all morning. We delayed our day by quite a bit because I didn’t want to go have fun knowing our bunny had been home without us during his last breath. I sat on the balcony of our AirBnB, watched the ocean, journaled, and thought of our bunny. He was a marvelous little guy, he’d been with us since the month before we got married. He had moved with us numerous times and brought joy to our days. He was so good-- Roger never bit anyone, LOVED blueberries with his whole soul, and was the water chugging champ! He is missed, dearly.
About a month after he passed, during a depressive episode of mine actually, I finally decided I needed to clean up his cage and move the items to the barn to be sold (we ended up selling all of his things to a little girl who was getting her own bunny as a first pet). It was very sad seeing his spot empty (and poor Henry was utterly confused by this!) but Caleb and I decided to fill that space again with the table and chairs we had removed to make room for Roger’s cage. Now we use his spot everyday, happy to have a table, but devastated as to why we now have a table. I’d much rather eat dinners on our couch if that meant we could still have him hopping around...
The next month, however, didn’t get better. It got so much worse.
My grandpa, Ron, passed away on Feb 20th. It was a long month leading up to this, because towards the end, as his body started failing him more and more, his mind was also getting intoxicated by his liver failure. Liver failure sponsored by agent orange. His service to our country in Vietnam led to his demise even 40 years later. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t easy, but he was worth the struggle.
I had chaperoned him to his last visit to the hospital on one of the worst nights of his confusion. We were in that emergency room for hours. It was long and exhausting, full of anxiety for me (so much so, I had a panic attack around 5 am in the hospital lobby in front of everyone there!), but Grandpa was in a goofy mood. It was so nice seeing him that way because his personality was coming back. He was telling stupid jokes (17 times in a row, because he kept forgetting what he had just said) but nonetheless, fun. He made it all worth it, and still to this day, I am grateful for the seemingly endless night with him. About 11 days after that “wonderful” ER visit, he passed.
My mom and grandma had him put on hospice, since it gave him such better care and pain management. It also took a lot of strain off of us. My sisters and I took turns in the middle of the night to care for him, basically making sure he didn’t get out of bed, or need anything while my mom and grandma -tried- to sleep. It was a long week of barely any sleep, and stress levels so high you didn’t know how to manage those feelings. I felt as though I was practically a zombie, only making it to the next day because we knew Grandpa needed us to be there for him. We didn’t want him to go, but as time went on, it made it easier to say goodbye knowing there was peace for him on the other side. On that night my sister and I sat by his bedside with mom, listening to her telling her Dad that it’s okay, that we will be okay. He passed somewhere around 7pm.
It had been a long February, yet it gave us ample time to spend with family…and cats! Especially for Henry, who got to hang out with his siblings, that live with my grandma, quite a bit! A couple of them even laid at grandpa’s feet throughout those weeks. Hope kept up being her cute self, of course! Available for emotional support -usually- whenever I needed. But who are we kidding, it’s Hope…she did her own thing most of the time!
March was a little better, we were able to catch up on sleep, and get back on a schedule. I even filmed my first wedding of 2023 later in the month. But even still, there was another death waiting for us. Caleb’s family cat, Sugar, passed away on March 31st. She had a growing mass in her abdomen and had to be put down to end her suffering. While not as devastating to us compared to our other two traumas this winter, we couldn’t help but find the irony in the old adage of bad things coming in threes. We hope we used up all of our “bad thing” allotment for this year, but it’s still early.
Well, that was certainly all very depressing. Thank you for taking the time to read it, as these events really are the main points of our storyline during the winter. Let’s switch it up now, with the lighter, more joyful things in our life these days. There were many babies born this past winter in our family and of friends! Of the four that we knew, three of which were family members. So it felt somewhat comforting through all of the sadness, that new life was emerging from it! We gained; a niece from Caleb’s older brother; Emily’s good friend, Alexis, gave birth to a boy; Caleb’s cousin Alec and his wife Shayna gave birth to their first daughter; and Emily’s cousin, Steven and his wife Krystal, gave birth to a boy!
On the note of the RV and what went on this winter (the news you were probably more interested in):
So at the beginning of winter, Caleb installed all of the skirting, heat tape, and foam board. The foam board covered the bedroom and living room windows, just so it stayed a little more warmer in there. It worked great, but I hated it! Henry and I were the most excited about de-winterizing the rig, because we wanted our windows back! You’ll find Henry most days on our made up bed, snuggling up to our pillows watching the birds fly by the bedroom windows. I also wasn’t a fan of our rugs we put down all over. They did keep us warm, and kept toes and kitten paws from freezing, but they got so filthy all the time. Without them, I can just sweep up the dirt and easily brush it into the pan. Our vacuum was also broken all winter (from Roger’s bedding, *sigh*), so the dirt just hung out on the carpet until Caleb was able to fix it without freezing to death.
We did stay very warm, however, one of the things we were most concerned about in the winter was if we would be ice cubes by the spring thaw!! With all of Caleb’s preparations, and how well our RV seemed to be built, we almost got too warm most of the time. There were multiple occasions these past few months, where we had to turn the thermostat down! We also invested in a 100lb propane tank (instead of our usual 30lb ones) since the heater running all the time meant we ran out frequently. With the newer, larger tank, we got about two weeks out of it, before we needed to switch it out or refill.
View from our balcony at the FL AirBnB.
To sum it all up… We stayed warm and safe in our RV this past winter. It went pretty well, considering all our worries in the fall!
The positives were not all we had, though. Not everyone in our “caravan” survived the winter. Our experience with loss is easily paralleled with pioneer times when you had to fight to survive the winter, and how not everyone will make it. So we take our “victory” in the cold with a grain of salt, because we lost so much this season.
We will continue RVentures (and our Instagram which got neglected) this spring with our first trip of the season back to Holland, MI!
