Life's Greatest Adventure: 59 Years and Counting

The Adventuress on our new tractor. Ready to bush-hog. 2005.

I've always believed that marriage is life's greatest adventure.

Louise was 19 when we met, just before she began her junior year at Florida State. The next year we were married on August 21st, 1965. 59 years ago today. We spent our honeymoon rambling around the northeast Georgia mountains, the first of many, many travels. I began to realize on our honeymoon that I had married someone whose spirit of adventure was equal to my own. As she told me later, one of the reasons she married me was because she "knew it would be an adventure."

After she graduated, we moved to Miami, where we both taught. Donny was born in 1968, and that fall we began two years of teaching at a private school in Miami.

The verdant Louise. Miami, 1970.

In 1970, we moved to Chattanooga, which I consider my home town. In 1972 Louise began nursing school, fulfilling a lifelong ambition. When she graduated, she went to work as an emergency room nurse. In the late '70s she began working as a home health nurse, driving the back roads of northwest Georgia to care for home-bound patients, often in remote areas.

In 1975 we moved across the state line into Georgia. All three of our sons graduated from Ringgold High School. In 1985, we began to look for property in the country. That fall, we found 30 acres in northwest Georgia's McLemore Cove and bought it.

Don, our youngest, joined the army in 1987, and in December of that year we moved into a 12x40-foot mobile home on our little farm, where we soon began to raise a small herd of cattle. I was 50, Louise was 42.

In 1994 we built the home where we lived until 2021. Then followed two years of travel in a fifth-wheel trailer. In 2023 we moved into our present home in Knoxville.

Louise in Italy, 2005.

Through the years we've been privileged to travel to many of these United States and to more than 30 foreign countries. Our spirit of adventure is undiminished, but age may be beginning to catch up with us!

We have been blessed to have had many adventures. But the key point in this narrative is this: just about everything we did was an adventure for us. Because we made it so. 

About the equipment: The picture of Louise on the tractor was made with a Canon EOS 20D camera and a 50mm lens. "Verdant Louise" was photographed with an original Nikon F, my first really good camera, a 135mm Tamron lens, and Tri-X film. The photo of Louise in Italy was made with the 20D and an EF 24-85mm lens.

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

If you would like to have a print of one of my photographs, check out my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  If you don't find what you want there, let me know and I'll arrange to include it in the gallery.

Photography and text copyright 2024 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography    digital photography      film photography     Canon EF 24-85mm lens   Canon EOS 20D camera     Nikon F Camera     Tri-X film    Tamron lenses