Whispering Winds Blog

I remember my 50th birthday very well. I was still employed in a traditional job, a manager in the financial systems department of a regional telecommunications corporation. I was using my MBA to obtain a respectable salary, but I wasn’t enjoying the work, and I certainly didn’t feel I was doing anything very worthwhile with my time. On June 24, 1998, I ran some errands during my lunch break. When I returned, my staff (mostly 30-year-olds) had decorated my office with black crepe paper streamers and balloons, and they brought a cake for the whole office to share with me. They felt sorry for me for turning 50, and they wanted to help me feel better now that I had suddenly grown old and was “over the hill.”

Little did they know I was just beginning the best time of my life! Within that year I quit my job and created a business for Mim and me (Korth-Jacobson, LLC). We turned our farmhouse into a bed and breakfast, and I set up a small business consulting practice, doing mostly project management for residential developers and a local bank. I also got serious about being a church organist. A few years later we converted the B&B into an assisted living business which would become our primary business for almost 20 years.

During that first year in my 50s, I accompanied Mim on a business trip to Provincetown, Massachusetts. At the time Mim was working as a research assistant at the UW School of Nursing. Part of her job was to recruit older lesbians to participate in a study about breast cancer screenings. The purpose of the business trip was to attend the national conference of an organization of older lesbians in order to make connections to recruit participants for the study. The significance of this trip is that while exploring Provincetown we succumbed to the temptation to buy into a 98 percent women-owned timeshare less than a block from the ocean. That purchase changed the way we would vacation for the rest of our lives. Although we went back to that Cape Cod timeshare only four times over the next 25 years, by being able to exchange vacations with other resorts, we have traveled all over the country, always staying in beautiful condos. Timeshare ownership also provided me a quiet place just an hour from home (Christmas Mountain) to get away more than a hundred times over the next 25 years to write five books and this blog.

It seems like just a few days since I celebrated my 50th birthday and walked away from my secure corporate job to begin the real adventures of my life. The calendar says it’s really been 9,131 days. I know that’s not true. Maybe if I had stayed in my corporate job it would have seemed that long.

Mim and I say we retired in 2019 when our last assisted living resident passed away, but we’re still helping a few people deal with health challenges in their own homes, I’m still playing the organ in church, and I’m still writing this blog. God has certainly been good to us. I don’t know how many “days” or “years” we have left, but I’m looking forward to even more adventures. At least another “few days.”