Personal disaster requires ugly crying.

Grieve as hard as you need to and hope for healing.

The best stories often begin with a personal disaster, and one of those happened to us this fall.

Through a series of unfortunate events, Mike and I found out that a refrigerator hose had been leaking under our house on Maui for a year, possibly longer. The trickle was just enough to saturate the soil beneath the house and the cinderblock wall of the garage, where we had left behind our most precious items when we moved to the continental USA.

​For folks who don’t know, we moved suddenly to California in 2017 to help care for my mother-in-law during her end of life. We had not planned to go, nor had we planned to stay there long, but we ended up relocating and buying a house as our children married and our grandbabies were born. 

Because our move was made in haste, we didn't rent a separate storage unit. Instead, we packed the garage with our best furniture, keepsakes, and my extensive collection of paintings, which I had been collecting for thirty years. Each was carefully wrapped and s…