#15

Over the years, we had taken Sunday afternoon drives wherever we were living.  We would stop at new housing developments and  look at the beautiful model homes.  I would get ideas and he would have dreams.  We saw a beautiful home in Virginia.  We loved the floor plan.  It was a two story farm house and had a wrap around porch.

I took some pictures so we wouldn't forget the features we liked the most.

Before moving away from Jacksonville in 1987 to Norfolk, Virginia we were on one of those drives heading south to St. Augustine along US1.  It wasn't developed at all.  We saw a billboard advertising a new development called Quail Ridge Farms.  I jotted down the number and we stopped at a gas station and called about more information.  The realtor met us and took us for a drive around the vast wooded acreage behind Nease High School.  We loved it and could afford to buy a three acre lot.  By the time we left Virginia, we had paid off the lot and had our house plans drawn up to build that beautiful brick home with the wrap around porch on our property.

It was perfect.   We did not have everything upscale but would work on that as the years went by.

Before we left Virginia, the girls and I went to Naples, Italy to meet him when the ship was there.

We spent a four day weekend on Capri.  Heaven to be together again in such a beautiful place.

Lauren was a senior and Wendy a freshman at Nease when we moved into our dream home August of 1992.  Jimmy stayed in Norfolk, Va until he retired from the Navy Jan 1, 1993.  Yeah, twenty years!

Times were tight for us there.   I went back to work at Memorial.   Jimmy couldn't get hired in law enforcement because of a hiring freeze.  He put himself through the St. John's Police academy and never could get hired on full time.  He bought a tractor and blade and did landscaping work on his own for developers.  He made our home beautiful by doing all the work himself.   He planned out the sprinkler system and put down all the sod. He rented a back hoe and dug out a beautiful stocked pond with fountain out back.  We had a pool table upstairs in the game room for the girls and their friends to come over and hang out.  He took his tractor and cleared the equestrian trail around the development so our neighbors who had horses could ride. We had made some nice friends in the neighborhood Karen and Roger, Pam and Reese and several others.  He loved playing with their kids.  Our daughters met some of the best friends they still have today.   It was home.

One evening as I came home I saw him sitting by the garage on the concrete with a bucket.  He was cradling a fish that was struggling to survive.  He kept the water swirling across the fish's gills.  I think he sat there at least three hours before the fish died.

Apparently some of the yard fertilizer had washed into the pond with a recent heavy rain and had killed several fish.  He felt awful.

A couple of stray cats came into our lives, too. Smokey and Ariel.  They were adorable and although I had sworn off any more pets it was too late as Jimmy had been feeding them.  They went from the palmetto patch to the big house in no time flat and lived long, fat, happy cat lives!

Three years later he got called that he was hired by the Jacksonville Sheriffs Office!  I remember the girls asking him if we could finally go shopping!

"Yes, take them shopping!"