The big move to the Southland

After our son passed away in 2019, life changed dramatically. We used to have nurses coming into our home 247/365. The best thing I could do to manage it was to make friends with them. A couple of the nurses liked makeup, so we would talk about my businesses, and one liked American Idol. so we would watch it together on her shift. One was a very good family friend, so we talked about everything. It was nice, while Landon had a nurse, I had a built-in friend. After he passed away, the house was quiet, the grief was thick, and the world just seemed empty.

My mother-in-law had moved down to Wabasha a few years back because housing was not affordable where we lived. I was not too big on road trips or any trips because if Landon needed us, I needed to be able to get back to him quickly, but now that he was in Heaven, we could take those little road trips, so down to Wabasha we went. It was a great day, and to be honest, I had no idea how pretty it was. I always thought Dulth was the prettiest place I had ever seen, but little did I know I was about to see my own little paradise.

When we were passing through Lake City, I was mesmerized by the sailboats on the lake, it was absolutely the prettiest thing I had ever seen, it felt like I was driving down the coast. The scenery was everything! I told Sean, when or if I ever wanted to move out of the. Cities, this is where I would want to land. He said, “Whenever you are ready, I am game!”

A few months later, I started having nightmares about Landon that he was stuck at the hospital and I could not get to him, I started seeing things like shadows and orbs ( I think that’s what they are called). I knew that God and Landon were telling me it was time to move…and time to move on!

I put out an ISO (in search of) in a Lake City/Frontenac Facebook group looking for a rental. We found one! I cute little house that was perfect for us, the owner was renting it for a year, then she was moving back to MN, we filled out the application, got accepted, and sent our notice to our Prior Lake landlords.

We lived in Frontenac for a year, and it was nice, but I knew I wanted to end up in Lake City. Where we lived in Frontenac, we lived in a valley where there was no TV service (not even network TV), no streaming service due to bad internet, and horrible phone service, which didn’t work very well for my business. However, we thanked God for his blessings, met some fantastic people, made some great friends at the Whistle Stop Cafe, and enjoyed the year there.

We lived super close to a cute little beach where we took daily family walks with our two dogs, skipped rocks, went swimming and enjoyed the gorgeous old colonial style houses. It is a very cool area…but my heart was still in Lake City.

Near the end of our year in the Frontenac house, the caretaker let me know that the owner was moving back, so we would have to find a new place. This time around, I put up flyers in all of the local stores to see if anyone would maybe see it and have a rental for us. It was about a week later that I went into my favorite boutique downtown and asked the owner of the boutique if her landlord would have any rentals. She texted him, and right away he wrote her back that he did. We went to see it, but that house wasn’t going to work for us. We were pretty bummed!

Later that week, I got a call from a guy who said he would rent us his huge house, but that one began to seem very sketchy, so we waited and we prayed. About a week later, the landlord my friend rents from texted me and said that he had a house for us, BUT the neighbor upstairs was known to be a little loud. I said NO PROBLEM. I was a preschool teacher and daycare provider, and I can handle loud! He approved us, and we moved to the beautiful LAKE CITY!