No, I’m not looking for another child: the two part-time ones I have (I’m a stepmother) are quite enough, thank you, especially now that they’ve become adolescents whose job description appears to be driving the adults in their lives completely around the bend.
No; I’m talking about geocaches.
We’re officially moving down to Cape Cod, to the Provincetown area that has long been my spiritual home and now will be my fulltime physical one as well. It’s a Very Good thing, but entails juggling more details than I’d ever imagined.
It also means that we can no longer “own” geocaches in the New Hampshire area. When one places a geocache, one also commits to maintaining it, to checking it periodically to make sure that appropriate objects are in it, that the logbook isn’t full, that no one has moved it. To do that, one must be physically present, so the custom is when one leaves an area that one either removes the cache or puts it up for “adoption.”
My Manchester cache was easy to place: MuchAdo, a local caching friend, loves the cache (called “Dark Satanic Mills,” for obvious reasons) and asked for it as soon as he heard about our proposed move. So he has now officially adopted it and my cache is no longer my own. Yes, there’s some sadness in that, as there’s sadness in any good-bye.
Paul’s caches are all intricate, involve several waypoints, and are often in difficult-to-reach places, making them difficult-to-place-for-adoption caches. He was able to persuade a sometime-geocaching friend down in Lexington (Mass.) to adopt “Bridge Over The River Something,” as it’s close by where the friend works. Eventually HockeyPuck, a Manchester friend, agreed to take on Paul’s caches in toto, mostly because he didn’t want to see them go away. HockeyPuck was treated for cancer some years ago and kept his mind away from dark thoughts by working on Paul’s puzzle caches on his way to and from Boston’s Mass. General for treatment, so these caches are meaningful to him.
My stepson Jacob, on the other hand, was happy enough to permanently disable his cache, the cleverly titled “Hard Rock Caché.” Anastasia wants hers to be adopted, so soon we’ll put up a notice, and include the request that a fellow horse-lover take it on; its name, “Sparkle and Shimmer,” refers the visitor to a poem about horses … “gypsy gold.” We’ll see what happens!
All in all, it’s an emotional time. We’ve all put hard work into putting our caches together; we’ve read with delight what geocachers have written in their logbooks about our caches and their adventures finding them; they’re our creations. To say good-bye is tougher than I’d imagined.
–Jeannette Cézanne
www.jeannettecezanne.com
Posted by: Opening the heart — jcezanne
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