Gifts and Super Powers

As you can tell already from this blog, my husband has the gift of words. He has always been very good at writing. When we first met, he was writing poetry about darker times. (One of our first dates was to attend a poetry reading event at the Alley Cat Lounge in Broad Ripple, Indianapolis.) When we dated long distance for a while, he would write me lovely letters, long before emails and texting existed.

A visual communicator by education, Dennis has spent his professional life in advertising and marketing, communicating through both words and design. He honed his craft and became quite adept at communicating with Chinese manufacturers the last 20 years. He could clarify the demands of the clients or bosses by breaking down complex thoughts and sentence structure to simpler, clearer language, often translating it back and forth from English to Chinese, with the help of Google, to get the meaning just right. Or quickly draw an exploded view of a product design on dinner napkin, office paper or in a CAD program to help pinpoint the problem or explain the issue at hand.

During the last 15-20 years, his work took him on several trips a year, mostly to Hong Kong and China. We totaled it up once and he was out of country 1/3 of each year, most years. While away, he would write me emails to stay in touch. Some were deep and pensive, others downright funny. Some were briefly written in the early morning hours as he prepped clear-headed for a client meeting. Others were written in wee morning hours after he returned quite fuzzy headed from being out all night due to the entertaining habits of Chinese hosts. I have kept those emails for years. There is plenty of material in those emails. I have often thought he should write a book.

When we decided to do this trip, we did a lot of online research and found many travel blogs to help us prep for the journey. We thought we could do this; we could blog about our travels. So we set out to create this travel blog. It's not as easy as it might seem. He's much better with the words. I find composing posts to be quite arduous. He's the story teller. I am a chronicler.

Instead of writing, I prefer to spend my time taking photos of the beautiful places we see and sharing them with family and friends. Or trying to make the RV feel like home by making healthy meals for us while he does the writing. I have challenged myself to see how creative I can be with a single skillet, Bella Pot and baking sheet as that is all the space this RV kitchen allows me. He may have the gift of words, but my super powers are in the kitchen. Or so I like to think. I will share some of the meals I've made based on the "grains, greens and beans" approach we've embraced.