Chapter 18 - Clear Blue Sky
Coincidence Speaks
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Happy Friday friends! Welcome to Chapter 18 of Coincidence Speaks. No worries if you’re new here, or aren’t all the way caught up—chapters are crafted to be read on a standalone basis. For the full experience head this way to start at the beginning!↩️
Chapter 18 finds Paul and Clara on the other side of a frenetic Disney World “vacation,” on the cusp of a new life.
Chapter 18
Clear Blue Sky
In the thirty hectic days following the Great Disney Purge, Paul and Clara succeeded in selling their home of ten years, leaving behind three decades of suburban living on the pavement of a 7-Eleven parking lot. All of the sales proceeds were reinvested into a brand new life in the country.
As they arrived at their new home on the first day of the move, the children couldn’t wait to dash out of the car to play in the open fields like they had upon their first family visit. Paul watched their faces as Clara spoke.
“This is where we’re going to live now.”
Their twin priceless gasps were enough to make two years’ worth of his time away from them in the office worth it, and all of the frenzied activity of the past month was instantly forgotten.
They went from a dozen houses visible from their backyard patio—Paul had counted: twelve exactly—to the nearest neighbor hidden beyond a quarter mile of wooded pines. Telephone poles and rooftops gave way to panoramic starlit skies and sprawling rose gold sunsets. Rather than concrete, asphalt, chain restaurants, and perfect rows of box houses, the sun now rose and set every day on a rural twenty acre paradise.
For better or for worse, it was now a one mile walk to get the mail.
Every so often, a fleeting new look would flicker through Clara’s green eyes, a look Paul had never seen before. “This place… feels magical,” she whispered in awe. “I can’t believe this is actually where we live.”
There was something emerging in her now—something he hadn’t seen in their decade of marriage while she’d worked her own way up the corporate ladder of the life or death medical field, from floor nurse to nurse practitioner. Paul’s leap of faith and resulting career success now helped give Clara the freedom to set her own flexible hours.
No longer confined to the oppressive grey corridors of the hospital where she would work back-to-back backbreaking 12-hour shifts, her own inner child reawakened—an adventurous spirit now free to roam through undulating fields of waving wildflowers and acres of enchanted woods.
Instead of the harsh physical labor of moving patients twice her weight without any help, without even time for a bathroom break, her back now ached from new passions: gardening, animal rescue, and sustainable agriculture. Strewn everywhere about their new home were books and memoirs on holistic farming, permaculture, seed cultivation, and cover crops. Instead of magazines, bills, and advertisements, their countertops were now covered by homegrown tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes and streaks of garden soil.
Clara had always had a soft spot for rescuing animals, and now there was more than enough spatial freedom to rescue away to her heart’s content. So she soon added a rescue cat to the family, then another, then chickens, then ducks, and then a sprightly gaggle of four goats.
She brought Noel and Luke along into her magical new world, and Clara was more joyful than Paul had ever seen her. For the first time in her adult life, she was finally able to slow down and savor each day as it unfolded.
In her own serendipitous coincidence, Clara soon came to discover that the preeminent program for sustainable agriculture in the state was being taught at the community college that just happened to be five minutes from their new house, and began taking courses there.
As for Paul, he put his softened businessman’s hands to work over the Christmas holiday that year, callousing them up carving out walking trails that mirrored the creek snaking through the woods. He built a coop and run for the chickens and ducks. And he expanded new garden areas to provide more space for his Clara’s ever-growing harvest.
With all of the new extracurricular activities going on at the new family “farm,” he relished the prospect of some smoother sailing at the office for a while, without the responsibility of team of people reporting to him.
Life had finally split wide open, nothing but blue sky in all directions.
Paul thought he wanted some smoother sailing, but what was really calling was the open ocean. A subtle pull persisted in the deeper fibers of his being, a soft yet insistent clarion call towards more quiet, more spaciousness... more stillness. The new home environment seemed to echo in it, an ancient remembrance beckoning him now.
At first, the move from a tiny plot in the suburbs to more than twenty acres had been a jolt to the system for both of them. Like uprooting a plant and putting it in a larger pot, the initial shock led to hesitance in spreading out roots. The space was a little daunting; its silence deafening—at night Paul and Clara’s imagination ran wild wondering what might emerge out of the impenetrable black woods coiling all around them.
Yet the open expanse of spaciousness, of the unknown, began to rekindle the powerful desire to resume his old awareness expansion practices once more. This time though, Paul knew better than to push the envelope with aggressive breathing and visualization techniques, instead incorporating a steady, gradual practice.
So he began getting up earlier in the morning just to simply sit in the new quiet. Instead of being surrounded by the gas-powered thrum of rush hour and the morning hustle of twelve other families within immediate earshot, Paul was embraced by birdsong and the wind creaking its way through cedars and pines.
And from a health standpoint, rather than pushing for the next fitness achievement at the nearest gym on spare lunch breaks like he used to, he now found himself being drawn to explore local parks, wandering through natural settings during open lunch slots. There was more than enough exercise to be had at the “farm,” to be sure.
After all, on top of the still-demanding full time business career with all of its inherent goals and responsibilities, Paul was jointly responsible for the physical maintenance relative to taking care of five cleared acres, a thousand square feet of new garden space, fifteen chickens, four goats, three ducks, three rescue cats, one dog, three humans, a peach orchard, and an apple orchard.
“All this place needs is a partridge in a pear tree,” he wrote in his journal the day Clara came home with yet another pair of goats, the Twelve Days of Christmas running through his head.
But even among heightened home responsibilities, life moved along evenly and effortlessly, and Paul experienced ever more balanced satisfaction and contentment. The best of both worlds—a deep sense of contribution to family and career and community, and a vibrant inner life that brought constant deeper meaning to the outer one, bringing a powerful sense of cohesion into his daily activities and relationships.
Their kids were growing up with small town values in a close-knit community, his wife was rediscovering the magic of her own childhood, and Paul was well-positioned in a supportive career with plenty of income, plenty of challenge, and plenty of individual autonomy. The traumatic specter of Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy and all the strange events following were well in the rearview, distant stepping stones to a new life. Finally… it had all come together.
One night as they all nestled together on a picnic blanket in their expansive backyard, Paul gazed up at the stellar blanket of stars above with Clara and Luke and Noel snuggled close and pinched himself, overcome with quiet gratitude, glad for the darkness to hide sudden tears. He took an inner snapshot of the moment, preserving it forever in his memory.
“Does it get any better than this?”
It was a rhetorical question, of course, and one soon forgotten—but nevertheless, something was listening.
End Chapter 18
Chapter 19 will post next week. Thanks for being here in interactive real time! Comments and feedback always welcome.
In gratitude,
E.T. Allen