Happy Birthday, Chief! Grateful To Be On The Journey With You

Jeff and I prepping for a hot air balloon trip, September, 2019.
Today's his birthday, and I marking the day by being
thankful for being Watson to his Holmes.

 Here's one very good reason among many to honor my husband, Jeff Modereger today, on his birthday.

Nearly one year into Covid-19 "sheltering in place" with him at home, he still hasn't killed me. Yet. 

I do hope this next year of Jeff's life is better than the past 12 months. Of course, I wish that for (almost) everybody. But since I'm so close and in love with Jeff, I wish that even more for him.

For such a rough year, Chief, as I call him, has remained remarkably cheerful.  Despite all the bad news. Even before the pandemic really took hold last March,  his beloved mother passed away.  He carried on.  

Then, the pandemic shut everything down. Chief, a very social guy who still loves his work designing theatrical stage sets, had that taken away from him.  No theater due to social distancing, so no set design. 

Well, almost. Making the proverbial lemonade out of lemons, he's been set designing the house.  Chief is not happy without a project. Lots of clutter disappeared in Chief's orgy of cleaning, trash dumping and reorganizing. New paint, new appliances, new flooring, hell, a whole new kitchen.  The house looks almost completely different than it did a year ago. 

I guess Chief is giving us a gift on his birthday: He's telling us to take advantage of a bad situation. Keep following your passions, just modify those passions to fit these (hopefully temporary) times. 

Through it all, he's kept a sense of humor, and has prodded me to do the same.  Since Chief can't set design the house 24/7, he finds other projects. Ancestry, mysteries, political news. 

Which leads to another lesson he taught me, another gift. (I hope he doesn't resent that he's giving the gifts on his birthday, not the other way around).

Anyway, we can't be all we can be with our lives if we're stuck at home most of the time.  However, our imaginations are free to go anywhere we want them to go. 

So, in the theater of Jeff's mind, he's become a bit of a detective, an old fashioned crime investigator.   He's addicted to - and has gotten me addicted to - mysteries like "Miss Scarlet And The Duke," set back in Victorian London; "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries", (1920s Australia);  "Father Brown," (Post-World War II small town England) and "Death In Paradise," (contemporary Caribbean island). 

Chief has gotten so good at this, that I bought him a Christmas gift consisting of letters that arrive in the mail that have mysteries he needs to solve. He finds these mailed in mysteries pretty easy to figure out.  

I guess I have to stop calling him Chief and start calling him Sherlock. 

Soon enough, we hope, this bad year will fade. Chief and I will get back to our previous plan of exploring more parts of the world, checking off items on our bucket list, living more fully. 

Going forward, I  don't know whether Chief will solve real-life murder mysteries, design the hell out of the world, explore far flung places or just keeping stopping to smell the roses. 

Whatever happens, I wake up every day knowing how lucky I am to be Watson to his Holmes. Hopefully, Chief and I have lots more of life's mysteries to solve going forward, counting many more birthdays along the way. 

Happy Birthday, Chief!

Love, "Pete"