It is a beautiful November day and I am smiling at all of the sunshine around me this morning.  We have arrived back in Florida for the winter from our home in Michigan and I am so happy to be here.  No matter where I look I see the familiar faces and scenes that are welcoming us back.

It is not that I was overjoyed to leave the north.  This year it has been blessed with a lot more sun and warm weather than is normal for a northern state in November. Living on a farm in the summertime is something for anyone to be grateful for. Altho we are retired there are still many obvious blessings when you live in a farming community.  The abundance of fresh produce, the orchards to walk thru, the lack of traffic on the highways near us, all of these things make summer a delightful place.

But! Yes, everything changes. We begin to feel a nip in the air, it is getting dark an awful lot earlier, and during one rain shower it actually turns to snow for a few minutes. And then we know it is time to start changing addresses, packing up our summer clothes, and heading for our home away from home.

This year we decided to take a different route, some back roads and highways we had never traveled before, and so it became an adventure with less traffic, more rural scenery, and a lot less trucks. We live in a beautiful country, folks, and we have just seen a lot of it. We avoided the big cities and I didn’t miss them a bit.  Next time we will explore even further.

But what I am noticing the most this year is how handy everything is here in Zephyrhills where we live.  Everything is so close, grocery stores that I like, libraries to enjoy only a mile away, doctors of all stripes near us, bread stores, tech stores, landscaping gardens, great restaurants, anything that we could need, all within ten minutes of our house.  When you live in the country as we do up north, we go 25 miles north, or 32 miles south to find the things we need.

So I have decided that in addition to the warm weather, our pleasure at being out of the winter storms, all of the things that I like about Florida, one of the very best things is how handy it is to be here, enjoying life, with the best of two worlds.