….and beyond

My Side of Town

When an out of town friend comes in and reserves a site at Paynes Prairie preserve State Park, you just better put your binoculars and camera in your back pack and be ready to go! Dr. Seidl, (Barb) and I met  in Ocala in 1979. We can neither of us rattle off the exact circumstance of of our meeting anymore, was it a bar?  Was it a party? There was a pool table, and I do recall a 1979 New Years Eve shindig. I was 28 and she was 26. I was wanting to train racehorses and she wanted to be a large animal vet specializing in cows. We spent time going and doing, Bonnie Raitt at the O’connell Center, canoes, beaches and campfires, I think she even got me to fishing and on rainy or cold days we played backgammon with a couple of racehorse galloping friends. She was taking a course at UF, she hadn’t yet been accepted to Vet school.   It must have been winter because  in the summer  she was on Mackinac Island driving tourists around in a carriage pulled by the draft horses she cared for. Once she started vet school and I started training horses, we put our backs into the moment. Our visits became snap shots rather than home movies. And then ears passed until the day I answered the flip phone out on the porch and it was her voice again, some 30 years later. Now when she comes to town its like time stood still. There we are adventuring at the prairie, taking paths less traveled, happening upon nature as beautiful and as cruel as she can be. Going places because Barb says “Let’s go!” Since then I have lost and won the battle with alcohol, owned a farm, bought a motel in Ft. Lauderdale, traveled, and finally landed in Gainesville in 1995. Barb is now retired from her original life endeavor at a small animal clinic she owned with other Docs.  She worked for 35 years, now she is a part time surgeon, explaining to the clinic that hires her, she can help out reliably 8 months of the year, but when the cold air starts blowing, her and her husband Rick pack the R.V. and head to Florida. Lucky me.

What, my dear reader may ask, does this have to do with Real Estate? I dunno, except I get to go somewheres besides my side of town when Dr. Barb comes around.