For a good chunk of 1988, we planned a big November trip to China and Hong Kong, accompanied by law school friend Kate Garrett and her mother. It’s the subject of its own set of posts. We worried that Barb’s Mom, Louise, who was declining quickly might pass away while we were gone and we considered postponing the whole trip. But Louise promised she would be OK so we went ahead.
As the year wore on, Louise, fought her latest and ultimate battles with cancer. She had breast cancer in the early 1970s, and though she’d been mostly healthy through the time I’d known her, she continued to smoke as she had most of her life. The cancer returned with a vengeance during 1988, this time in her lungs. By the time we got to Christmas, 1988, she was in hospice care at home. Fred worked closely with the hospice folks and in fact became an active volunteer for several years in gratitude and recognition of their mission.
Louise fought hard to stay with the family through Christmas, and was mostly in good spirits, due in some part to morphine. She finally succumbed February 1, 1989. She was a fine lady, funny, loving and smart. We lost her far too soon.
Christmas 1988 was subdued, but lives went on. We spent a lot of time with Walt and Hugo, it seems.
And the same for much of that winter.
We even got Hugo involved in politics, sending a letter to our congressman concerning a federal tax on beer. Needless to say, Hugo’s voice was heard and he became a member of the Beer Drinker’s of America. Do we have a federal tax on beer? I think not!
In spring, we tried to cheer up Fred with a new kitten, Humphrey. He was a cute little kitty but it was hard to mesh with Fred’s life at that time and before very long Humphrey found a new home.
In May, 1989, Barb and Patti went on a vacation together to Bermuda. They generally had a good time, but it was the first and only time Barb vacationed solo with Patti and the only time either of us has been to Bermuda.
Things brightened with summer and warmer weather. We (mostly Barb) worked hard to make our front flower garden presentable. And we spent more quality time with Hugo, who kept getting huger.
In mid-summer, 1989, Patti and Lee hosted their first Pig Roast on the property they’d bought near Mt. Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. Barb and I went out the day before to help set up, dig the pit and prepare the pig and beef for their overnight cooking. It was a lot of work, but we had a good time of it. We were invited to sleep at the cabin but opted instead for the Motel 6 in town where there was a bathroom, shower and ice.
Getting ready included setting up a port-a-potty since the ancient little cabin on the property didn’t have electricity or plumbing. We also set up a hammock which became a welcome resting spot, even if it did swing a little low to the ground.
The party attracted about 50 people, friends and work colleagues of Patti and Lee’s, mostly. From our side, Fred, Betsy, Joe and Sarah Landise with her 3 kids attended. Fun and games included softball in a field infested with cow patties that we did our best to clear…another fun chore. Overall, it was a long couple of days with a lot of work but also a lot of fun. The food was good, the beer and bugs were plentiful, and the surroundings were bucolic and rustic, shall we say. Patti and Lee went on to host a number of other annual pig roasts at their property and later at their home in Nokesville. We attended most of them, but Lee found other helpers to dig the pits and handle the setup more efficiently.
Barb’s work friend, Mary Salhus, and her husband John visited our house. Mary was 7 months pregnant with her first daughter, Katherine.
Later in the summer, Barb’s office held its first (or at least the first we were involved with) annual picnic at Wheaton Regional Park. Barb organized much of it and I helped cook. We were friendly with a wider cast of characters, back in the day.
In September, we attended the wedding of another of Barb’s work friends, Sarah Willis Wilcox, at the historic Christ Church in Alexandria, VA, where George Washington and Robert E. Lee had once been parishioners. Many of Barb’s work friends attended on a nice late summer day.
Also in September, 1989, I started a new job at Hekimian Laboratories in Gaithersburg, MD. Thus it came to pass that both Barb and I started commuting from Falls Church into Maryland. It quickly dawned on me that it would make a lot more sense for us to live in Maryland and not fight the traffic across the Potomac. We started to consider alternatives.
To help with our decision-making process, I decided to consult a financial planner. This was my first experience working with one. The planner reviewed our overall financial status and helped decide how much we could afford on a new house. We also explored the notion of maybe renting out our home on Chrisland Cove, which had already appreciated considerably, rather than selling it right away. The final decision would depend on finding a house in the right price range that we could afford on our salaries and a relatively low down payment.
Apple picking time came in the fall, so we headed with John and Mary out to Stribling Orchard in Markham, VA with Mary and John, with Mary about as pregnant as she got. Barb started her tradition of baking apple cakes for anyone and everyone.
At about the same time, we went with Mary and John to the Arlington Food Festival, which honestly I don’t remember. We evidently had along with us a child named Matthew. I don’t remember Matthew, either.
Lee Bowman was a great student of the Civil War so we thought it would be fun to go with Patti and him to Gettysburg and get a proper tour. Lee was in his element, but I think he ended up walking the rest of us ragged around the various sites and monuments.
In the meantime, Mary finally had her baby, Katherine, whom we visited in her first and second months. We were finally getting better at holding babies.
Christmas 1989 and New Year 1990 came and went without notable moments, it seems, evidenced by lack of photos. Perhaps we can say we were starting to think about moving.
By early 1990, we’d made up our mind on moving and started looking mainly in Columbia because it was roughly equidistant between Gaithersburg for me and Security Boulevard for Barb. We wanted to be in a town with restaurants and stores and there weren’t a whole lot of other choices than Columbia. I spent a number of weekends scouting places, getting acquainted with Columbia’s neighborhoods and labyrinthine roads, narrowing the choices down for final visits by Barb.
By April, we decided on a house at 9808 Davidge Drive, a small cul de sac in Wilde Lake, off Route 108 near Centennial Park. The house was a traditional colonial about 8 years old with three bedrooms upstairs. We actually settled on the house in May for $215,000. We celebrated with a meal at one of Columbia’s only Chinese restaurants, Hunan Manor. More about the Davidge house in our next post.
We decided we could afford to rent out our Chrisland Cove house as long as we could get a tenant to more or less cover the mortgage. We were delighted to rent it to Congressman Mickey Edwards from Oklahoma. As it turned out, he rented from us for nearly three years but we never actually met him. He was a good tenant and we were lucky to be mostly absentee landlords, very glad that nothing went majorly wrong with the place. After Congressman Edwards there were a couple of other tenants but fortunately no big problems. We actually held onto the Chrisland Cove property until November 2000 before selling for about $245,000, $100K more than we paid for it (in December 2019, Zillow said the property was worth about $490,000).
Shortly after moving, Barb went on a Fisher family trip with Fred and Betsy to New Mexico and Arizona. They stopped in Taos and Santa Fe, then went west to sights in Arizona before finishing with a visit to Louise’s sister Leona and her husband Larry in Prescott. They also went up to Flagstaff for a day with Leona’s son Stewart, his wife Ann, and daughter Kate.
Later in the Spring, Barb’s work colleague, Gerard Keating, married Chris Garwood at a nice outdoor place near Annapolis. Most of Barb’s work folks showed up and by this time I was friends with many as well. I believe it was at this event that Henry Goldberg and Donna Eden officially became an item, as well. Romance was in the air.
In June, we gathered the whole Duncan clan at the South Seas Plantation on Captiva Island, Florida, for Mom and Dad’s 50th Anniversary. We had a good time, with some nice meals and a lot of giggles. More photos and details in our next post.
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