Turning south down I-75 in Florida, I begin to feel the pull of Wesley Chapel. A beautiful lakeside 4 acres where Janice, the kids, and I lived for one memorable year of a lease/option to purchase a dream, never fully realized.
Wesley Chapel was a year which included manifesting a beautiful chestnut mare, Jessie; Erinna defying gravity with the Barnum and Bailey Circus for the Kids; me coaching David and his Odyssey of the Mind team to 4th place in the national IBM smart kid’s competition, after which he then nailed First Place in the Pasco County Mathletes contest ; Erinna dancing to the oh, so ironic and fitting Green Acres theme song in her third grade jazz recital; my working on the statewide anti-gay initiative (which, this being Florida, failed); Jan leaving at 5:00 am to go travel with, photograph, and report on Jeb Bush’s campaign; me coordinating a statewide Planned Parenthood social marketing campaign targeted at males for reducing teen pregnancy and building a multi-racial coalition to take it over, something which the people who hired me said couldn’t be done.
It was a year of smelling springtime evening breezes sweetened by orange blossoms in the neighboring orchards, taking summer afternoon dips naked in our pool, marveling as box turtles 
migrated in the hundreds
down the sandy roads to our property, startling through a season of opening doors as a plague of small green frogs leapt through from every direction, after which we would discover their desiccated bodies in full extension throughout the house.
Wesley Chapel was the year the gorgeous dead scarab beetle we’d found on our land, then kept on the kitchen window ledge all winter long, suddenly resurrected.
Its metallic green, red, and black body lifting airborne by transparent silverfish wings while I stood, amazed, washing the dishes.
It was a year of coming to understand that despite this seeming bucolic country living, Florida was not home.
The people, the food, the climate, the intolerance, the lack of community, the Mormon sheriff across the road who led Militia maneuvers on his land every Sunday after church, filling the air with the sound of gunfire, grenades, the occasional rocket launcher; the absence of friends and family—it simply proved too much for David, Erinna and me.
The only reason we were in Florida in the first place was because Janice had insisted we nurture our fledgling relationship on her turf, her terms. Desperate to make it work, I’d acquiesced, selling my home, uprooting our lives, leaving it all behind for the dream of a family happy ever after.
Which wasn’t to be.
After a Christmas flight home to visit those we’d left behind, a visit in which I watched the faces of my children light up with a joy it never did in Wesley Chapel, I promised them we’d return to Portland at the end of the school year if they were still unhappy.
Janice and I fought almost every day after that. She became exhausted from working 10-12 hour days, eating almost nothing, drinking copious amounts of coffee, coming home depleted, expecting me to caretake.
Daily, despite my own fatigue, I worked to bring her back to life. Her Crohn’s Disease flared over and over again, frightening us both. Yet she would do nothing to change the pattern.
By the time we took an ill-fated family spring vacation trip to the beach, bringing along Janice’s mother, Marion, as an attempt to forge family, a symbolic, but very real, hurricane raged all around us.
Janice confessed to the first of many side relationships she would have throughout our life together as we stood, beaten by the wind and rain.
“Janice,” I said, “I love you. I gave up a life, a home, even my children’s happiness as proof of that love. I thought things would be different. I think we gave it our best shot here. I’m taking David and Erinna back to Portland where they belong, where they have friends, family and community.
If you want to come with us, I will be happy. If you don’t, I will understand. But things have to be different, Janice. I have to be able to trust, to believe you if it’s going to work out.”
In the days that followed, we aimed our minds toward the change, I sold my mare to a kind man who said, “If this horse could cook, I’d leave my wife for her, I love her that much.” Janice sold her golf clubs. Said goodbye to Cris.
We packed our things, put the kids on a flight home to spare them another long road trip. Janice and I left the house with our three stowaway cats, racing a hurricane named Erin, all the way through Missouri, where it finally veered north and left us in peace.
Thirty years is a long time, which is exactly how many years have passed since that drive back across the country to save our relationship, our family life. To try to make things work in Portland.
So much happened.
After ten years, our volatile, passionate, overwhelming relationship morphed. Our love became some kind of confusing, toxic, mutually hurtful stew.
When out of her mind one night after I’d confronted her with yet another secret, she tried to push me down a flight of stairs, I knew we’d finally crossed the line.
I left the next morning.
A decade and a half after that sad night, after a battle with Cancer she faced courageously, Janice died. She stayed close to David and Erinna to the very end, a true second mother loving them as her own children.
She and I had managed to forge a strange kind of partnership, both understanding that our love would never go away, but that we needed to find a different way to actualize it.
Her death tore me to pieces. I broke down. Afterward, out of necessity, I compartmentalized, placing her memory gently into a closed corner of my heart.
But her spirit is growing stronger and louder with every passing mile I travel. She is with me as I close in on the turn off to Wesley Chapel.
Then, it hits me: this part of my pilgrimage, the reason I’ve come all the way to Florida. Ostensibly to pick up a trailer, it’s really about making peace with that chapter of my life. Which was so huge in defining who I became. Who I am.
Making peace with Janice and me. Making peace with our love.
The community of Wesley Chapel has grown up in the decades since we lived in its sleepy patch of pine and sand. It is the fastest growing community in Pasco County. There is even a Toyota dealership at the intersection which was once wild land. Which is where I am writing this, waiting for an oil change and tire rotation that need to occur before my journey home.
The road to our property is still sand, I am pleased to see, albeit, now graded. No more wash boarded ruts jarring your shocks if you drive faster than 10 miles per hour.
Our house is still there, 
much as I remember it.
A good house, well built. Two stories, three bedrooms, a comfortable, sizable country kitchen, screened Florida room leading to the pool. A loft which became my office. A garage addition which became Janice’s.
It is a good family house, still housing a family from the looks of the things strewn about the front. But as I step out of my car to walk the perimeter, I note that the property is in disrepair. It breaks my heart.
The fencing is falling down in sections. The beautiful oak barn has weathered badly, the wood untreated, its metal roof and doors rusted. Jessie’s paddock and box stall with its attached tack room, an area I maintained scrupulously, has collapsed. A mound of old boards is all that remains.
The pasture, with it’s then young trees, has overgrown. 
There is so much beauty. The lake has edged closer to the property, the wetland is a marvel to behold. The huge pile of horse poo created by David shoveling the paddock to earn comic book money is now ablaze with wildflowers.
The air is sweet. Hundreds of songbirds are singing. A breeze moves gently through the beautiful moss draped trees. I close my eyes, feel the love that flourished. Breathe in, breathe out.
Let go of the anger, the pain. Allow the grief to move through me, vanish into the air.
I make my peace with Wesley Chapel.