7. Turtle Cove

I’ve just returned from a whirlwind spring break trip to Stillwater with the dog and the teenager, and I’m still processing every little morsel of new information that flew at me during that week. We arrived Saturday evening, travel-weary but not completely exhausted, and tried to settle in to my husband’s “bachelor pad.” It was more than a little like camping, minus the mosquitoes, and with a really convenient bathroom. The poor man has been fighting the smells and wildlife leftover from a previous tenant, carefully washing each dish as he uses it, and storing everything food-related—including the frying pan—in the refrigerator. He’s pretty much been living on eggs, bread, cheese, cold cuts and cut-up raw vegetables, and the occasional yogurt with fruit. I guess one could live indefinitely on that kind of a diet.

We enjoyed Sunday together driving around the different neighborhoods and hiking at a nearby lake, Lake McMurtry. The landscape was not how I expected Oklahoma to look; it was filled with spruce and cedar, with hills and rocks and loads of birds. There was, however, the ever-present red dirt which creeps into every part of your pants legs, shoes, and socks, and cheerfully decorates the bottom half of your vehicle when driving its ever-dusty roads.

My husband returned to work on Monday, and I made phone calls and explored a bit, while the teenager resentfully stayed in the apartment and FaceTimed with his friends who were enjoying spring break in more exotic locales. The rest of the week was punctuated with appointments with insurance agents, the closing on our property, meetings with builders, and long dog walks around a small lake nearby.

Blah, blah, blah, ho-hum. If you’re yawning now, then you’ll know how I felt then.
Not bored, exactly, but strung out and sleep-deprived (I might be getting too old to sleep on a cheap air mattress) and stressed, with no real purpose or direction. And in my head was a list a mile long of things I could have been doing back home. I had come to see my husband, but I hadn’t really considered the amount of time he’d be at work while we were there. So I was grateful to his new supervisor when she told him he should take the last day off of our stay and spend it with his family.

So we set off to explore the site of our new home, and find the pins at the four corners of the property. This sounds much easier than it was. Tree seedlings, fallen logs, and thorny tangled bushes make certain areas almost impenetrable. The north line of the property is lined with a wire fence for the horses the previous owners had. There are ridges and boulders, and a steep ravine leading down to the pond. It took us well over an hour to emerge from the wilds with some scratches and torn clothes, and a tiny bit of sunburn. We had found an old couch, parts of a motorcycle, and five golf balls; it seems that the neighbor has been using his back yard as a driving range. But the property is magnificent. Cardinals and blue jays flit and sing; fat rabbits watch from the shadows under the cedars; and our favorite resident, a giant snapping turtle, suns himself on a fallen log in the pond. My husband pointed him out to me, and we crept as close as we could to photograph him.

“We should have a name for our property,” my son exclaimed as we were eating dinner that evening at the local bar and grill.

And without even thinking about it, the words popped out of my mouth:  “we should call it ‘Turtle Cove.’”

A smile spread across his face, and his eyes brightened. “Yeah,” he said. “Turtle Cove. Yeah. That’s good.”

So while the world goes crazy and the rat race pushes on toward the vanishing point, we will have a tiny place of peace in Turtle Cove. It will require a lot of love and even more work than we can imagine, but we will make it our own.