Look up with a smile and go for it!

Look up with a smile and go for it! Many times in life an opportunity presents itself but we don't take advantage of it for reasons to many to mention. When the future looks this bright, don't let doubt cloud your mind or slow you down in the least bit.

Putting on a genuine smile is 99% of the battle when it comes to conquering life and the challenges it holds for us. My granddaughter at 4 years old taught me a very valuable lesson about the importance of being able to smile and laugh even in the worst of times.

My wife and I had suffered being infected with Lime's disease in the midwest many years back which nearly destroyed our immune systems. Then we were exposed to an extreme dose of pesticides which pretty much finished the rest of the damage done to us from having had the infections.

Not to mention the long treatment of antibiotics which we endured on top of all that. We had moved to a small community outside of Tucson Arizona and things went pretty well for a long time and then we had a young couple move out next door so they could get a larger place for their family. During all that time, a school system moved in right across the street pretty much along with several thousand homes that were built in the area as well. We no longer were living in the semi country area anymore. Then we had the great misfortune of having a neighbor move in that had a pesticide company. Without going into all the sordid details, lets just say that my wife ended up having to be hospitalized more than once from exposure and things did not go well.

We tried selling our home for quite some time with no luck because all of that took place just before the housing bubble burst so we had no luck in trying to sell and get out of our home and get to a safer location to live. I sold my business of mold making to some folks and that ended up not working out so well either. We again put our house up for sale and it actually sold and we closed on it the same day the bank was foreclosing on us.

We took what we got which wasn't much and moved up to our current location about twenty miles outside of Snowflake Arizona and purchased a piece of property to start over on. It wasn't our first choice to buy, but the first property we had planned on buying went under contract a day or so before we arrived and the second place we had put our earnest money down on and just before the end of the month when we were about to close found out that the person selling it didn't actually own it. Not their fault, as it was their parents who had put a quick deed on the land back in the 70's and it wasn't found out until the title company did the land title research on it. No one could reach the people that the deed now belonged to, so it went into limbo.

We closed on the new property we found after having spent well over a month parked out in the high desert in our old motor home. We had the necessary improvements made to the land for utilities and living space but even after installing our power pole which was only 650 feet away from the main power lines, it took over seven months to get power hooked up to our land. We were getting into winter quickly and with our health conditions we could not burn wood, nor did we have a place we could do that even if we wanted to.

Without being able to work in my own mobile shop to make custom chocolate molds to continue bringing in an income, our small nest egg was used up and gone before we knew it.

By spring time, we were in such dire shape that I personally just broke down. I found myself sitting on an old stump just sobbing with hopelessness.

That's when my granddaughter came up to me and told me "grandpa, the wimpy whiney man is going to come and take you away!" What do you do with that! In an instant I found myself laughing until I was crying from the laughter.

I found myself sitting and writing on a yellow pad when we didn't have power and when we could afford the gas to run a generator I spent time transferring what I wrote onto the old laptop I had. We eventually got our own satellite Internet connection and I started publishing my writing to Amazon Kindle books.

Once we got power installed, I set about building my custom chocolate mold business again and working heavily on building back my business and working on other ideas as well. We suffered another severe health issue as I went into third degree heart block and my heart gave out when the surgeon was putting in the wires for a pacemaker. This was because of the Lime's disease I had contracted earlier in life. My wife was so stressed out that she actually had a heart attack from all the stress. Believe it or not, I was actually able to smile through all of this and remain positive that things were and are going to improve to a much higher degree than ever before.

All of this because my granddaughter at 4 years old taught me how to laugh again and to keep a genuine smile on even in the worst of times. The vision of being able to not only grow and expand in life again and to help others do the same during this new growth period, is making me smile all the more. We have actually seen people living up here in the high desert in much worse conditions than we are and we have seen them smile and laugh and enjoy life with their children despite the odds.

Smiling is the healer of all wounds. So, look up and smile and succeed no matter what the odds!