I can’t express how it felt to drive into Pine Hills for the first time with my little mate tucked under my arm. I’ve talked about finding my legs and becoming productive again and climbing my own personal Mount Kosciusko but nothing compared to this. This was Mount Everest in comparison — all my dreams come true.
Finding Jenny meant I had someone to share my life. Two halves making a whole. But it also transformed the way I lived. She made a difference with the small things. Now when I went to town, I didn’t have to yell out to a complete stranger to help get my chair out and hope like hell he didn’t run a mile. If I was in a shop and bought something, I didn’t have to ask someone to take it out to the car and to hang around while I got in, then load my chair. Over the years I’d become reasonably comfortable with that, but in my eyes it still took away some of my masculinity. I had been constantly putting myself out on a limb, vulnerable to the mixed reactions I got from people.
Marriage to Jenny also meant big things in my life would never be the same. Now I had company when I travelled and someone to go on holidays with. She was there to share the experiences and reminiscence with afterwards.
She made my life much easier on the farm as well, helping with the little jobs that cropped up. In fact, she’s become a regular Mrs Fix-It. She changes the blades on my slasher, fills up my spray rig, fixes leaking troughs or strains loose fences. Mum and Dad were always happy and willing to help, but I hated asking them all the time. Now I didn’t have to.
And Jenny is a country girl at heart, practical and willing to have a go at anything. I think that had a lot to do with why I was so attracted to her. From our first few weeks together and visiting her Tamworth home, I quickly realised she was very much an outdoor person. You can’t choose the one you fall in love with, but it meant a lot to me, in the position I was in, to be with someone who didn’t mind getting her hands dirty. It would have been quite difficult if I’d married a girl who tended to squawk if she got a bit of shit or dirt on her. That would have made my life even more frustrating. Not that I would have fallen for someone like that anyway. Jenny was perfect for me in every way and that’s what I loved about her. If someone had told me I would find a great match, I couldn’t have believed in my wildest dreams she could be quite so ideal. She was the ball to my socket, the nut to my bolt. She fitted perfectly.
Thanks to Jenny many new doors opened for me. I’d never gone shopping just for pleasure before. It was a real novelty to buy groceries, for example. I relished wandering down the aisles, hunting around and seeing what was on the shelves. I liked the togetherness of it and discovering we both loved bookshops and hardware stores. We’d wander in them for hours.
With Jenny by my side I discovered a new sense of independence. Now I could dine out at a restaurant whenever I felt like it. Previously I had never done that unless I was catching up with mates. I felt like part of the gang again — I could go to a dinner or lunch or party and there were two of us. Before that I’d always gone alone and felt like Terry-tag-along.
There was also a tremendous sense of relief to be moving away from Mum and Dad. Even though we all loved and respected one another, I hated the fact I was in my thirties and still living with ‘Mummy and Daddy’. It wasn’t easy for anyone concerned. I felt I was interfering in their personal life, taking away their privacy. They deserved to be Darby and Joan, like all their friends.
On that topic Mum said, ‘Apart from all the care Sam needed, there were certain disruptions to our lives. I felt I had to feed him well, so I had to make an effort to have meat and three vegies for dinner and salads for lunch and extra things he might need.
‘The three of us would sit down to watch television with Sam’s wheelchair right up in the middle so he could see everything. And he wasn’t terribly inclined to watch Pride and Prejudice or Brideshead Revisited. He’d say, ‘What are you watching this crap for?’ and he’d flick it over to something dreadful and we’d go to bed.’
Mum was so right. Now they could live their lives the way they wanted to, and so could I.
Finally I was king of my own castle, and I got so much joy out of that. It was fun deciding what colour to paint a room, stripping, sanding and putting it all back together just the way we wanted it. As I’ve already mentioned, the house was still in need of a lot of tender loving care when we first got married. Aside from the cleaning and painting — it hadn’t seen a paintbrush in years — it wasn’t very accessible. The builders had made me a ramp up onto the western verandah but it was too steep. Then there was a trek across the lawn and a bit further to get to the car shed and my ute. We had a few tools but they were stacked on the floor. We didn’t have any storage or shelves or anything in the shed — it was an empty shell. The house yard was a jungle, overgrown with grass, with holes in the ground and wheel tracks where the builders had come and gone.
Two days after our wedding we arrived home and had to find the jigsaw pieces of our bed and put it together. It was an ancient double brass bed Jenny had been given by her grandfather. It looked immediately at home in our old house as it was a little the worse for wear, having been carted around the countryside as Jenny moved from place to place in her career as a journalist. We eventually found some sheets, blankets and pillows. At least now we had a bed to sleep on, among the rubble of our possessions. I probably should say Jenny’s possessions, because I owned virtually only my clothes and a couple of old pieces of furniture.
Setting up house was a bit of an adventure, reminding me of the stories of how my own parents started out. They began their married life on Bardin, which Dad owned in partnership with a mate. The deal was that whoever married first had to move out of the main house. It turned out to be Dad. So he and Mum dragged the original Bardin schoolhouse up onto the top of a hill, a few kilometres away. They started with this two-room building on a rocky hill in among the cypress pines, belahs and kurrajong trees. It had spectacular views, but it must have been a daunting task for the new bride. While Mum grew up in Warialda, she’d been living in London during her twenties and enjoying the high life. But she attacked the house and surrounds with relish. When I was two and they moved back down to the main Bardin house, she left behind her first beautiful garden. She had to start all over again. It always amazed me how hard my parents did it. I was glad I was following in their footsteps in a sense. Mind you, I didn’t have it nearly as tough as they did — they even had a pit loo.
On no account did I want to waltz into Mum and Dad’s house at Bardin with the pool and tennis court and everything a going concern — achievements which had taken them almost a lifetime to build. I wanted to save and work and do it my way, and then I’d value every little improvement. Not that I had much choice. Jenny and I didn’t have the money to go full bore, to do a major renovation. Instead, we did it room by room, acre by acre — with occasional help from friends and family when they came to visit. For us it was all about cleaning and scrubbing and mowing and planting trees and turning nothing into something special. It all brought a great sense of accomplishment and was made all that much better because I was doing it with my best mate.
Jenny didn’t mind living in the middle of nowhere, in a house that was a mess when we were first married. Some girls would have taken one look and run a mile, but Jenny didn’t. She just got in and cleaned it up.
Our home is still a work in progress. The only bathroom we have is on the opposite end of the house to our bedroom and outside as well. So it’s quite an expedition to get to the bathroom and a cold streak in the middle of winter. But I don’t dwell on it. That’s just the way it is and I just do it. It’s not going to kill me. Eventually we’ll have the luxury of an inside bathroom and we’ll really appreciate it when we can duck through a doorway into the shower and loo, where it’s warm in winter and cool in summer.
When we first got married we had no cooling and very little heating. We had an electric oil heater for our bedroom, but apart from that the only heating we had was a little fan heater Jenny had brought with her. It didn’t have much impact in the huge rooms in our house which stretch five by five metres across, with ceilings over three metres high. And it was made much worse by the two-or three-centimetre gaps under the doors, the crevices around the windows and the cold air rising up through the floorboards.
We were married in March and a couple of months later temperatures plummeted. One day we were so cold we were turning blue. It was one of those days when the wind goes straight through you. We sat eating lunch in the kitchen, still wrapped in our overcoats. We looked at each other and said almost in unison, ‘Let’s get the fire going.’
There was an old wood heater in a brick fireplace in the lounge room which we’d partly dismantled, intending to throw it out. We thought it wasn’t any good because it was rusty and full of water, but that day we were desperate. It took a hammer and WD40 to force the door open, revealing a firebox that was red with decaying steel, glistening in a pool of stagnant water. We mopped it up, scraped away the rust and tried to light the fire. It took a few attempts but finally it spluttered into life and we huddled around it — drawn like cockatoos to a grain silo. Later we discovered it needed only a new top on the flue and we’re still warming ourselves around it today. In fact, it’s a cracker of a fireplace.
It was fun to discover how similar our tastes were. We both like antiques and wood, things that are natural and rustic. No laminex and plastic for us.
Before I was married I did most of the mustering myself. We only had one bike and some of the paddocks were too rough and inaccessible for Dad’s Toyota, so I had to do a lot of it alone. Some paddocks were more difficult than others — along Croppa Creek was a nightmare because there weren’t many places where I could cross. I’d be going backwards and forwards from one side to the other trying to hunt the cattle out. It was painfully slow and invariably there’d be a few cattle I couldn’t get. So mustering was often a long, drawn-out affair that was as frustrating as keeping a rogue cow out of a barley crop.
Then Jenny came along on a horse and made it so much easier. She could fly down through the creek after the cattle and wheel them back. Between the two of us, with a two-way radio each to communicate, the mustering became a cinch. My frustrations were replaced with enjoyment, multiplied by the fact that Jenny got a lot of fun out of it. She was passionate about horses and loved nothing more than mustering in the creek with the wind through her hair, a regular jillaroo. Having grown up on a sheep and cattle place herself, she was immediately at home in both the paddock and the cattle yards.
And there was another bonus to having Jen mustering with me — she was there to rescue me when I threatened to slip off the bike. I’d yell out, she’d canter over on her horse and push me back on — my personal guardian angel.
Even so, she wasn’t always there to help, at least not on cue. One day I headed off to set up some gates while Jenny saddled her horse and she was going to catch up. I pulled up beside a gate, undid the latch and pushed it open. At the time the accelerator on my bike would sometimes stick but I was used to it, and knew to be careful. That morning, I went to putt off and the accelerator stuck. The front wheel climbed the mesh of the gate, like a goanna up a tree trunk, tipping the bike onto its side. I came off fairly gracefully and was unhurt. I bummed my way around to the side where the seat was and rested my back against the padding to wait for Jenny, knowing she’d be along soon on her horse.
Shortly afterwards I heard this almighty scream, ‘Sam … Sam are you okay … Sam?’ and the sound of hooves galloping towards the bike. I saw a glimpse of Jenny’s face pale and tight with terror, then flushed with relief.
‘Sam, you frightened me. I thought you were under the bike …’ she was shaking and angry and very upset.
‘I’ll never forget that morning,’ said Jenny. ‘I was riding towards the gateway when I saw the bike. Initially I thought it was upside down … and I couldn’t quite figure it out. Then I realised I was looking at its underbelly and wheels. But I couldn’t see Sam. I kicked my horse into a gallop and as I got closer, all I could see were Sam’s legs sticking out from behind the bike. I thought his body was underneath it. I’ll never forget how I felt. I felt sick, like my whole world had suddenly caved in on me. In fact, when I think back I can’t actually go there — because the overwhelming fear I felt is not a place I wish to go again. When I realised Sam was okay, I was really angry with him. At the time I don’t think he could understand my reaction, but I thought he was dead. After a lot of heaving I managed to get the bike back on its wheels and helped Sam back on. I’d been so frightened, and then so relieved that as we rode down the road to the paddock we were mustering I burst into tears.’
It didn’t occur to me that I would scare Jenny. I was sitting there, leaning against the bike with a big smile on my face and thinking, ‘Things didn’t go quite to plan this morning.’
One afternoon on my way back from Mum and Dad’s I saw a bull in the wrong paddock. That night I mentioned to Jenny — who was riding out the next morning to check some cows — ‘If you happen to see him you might just run him back into the paddock.’ But next morning as I headed back to Bardin, he was near the gate and I thought, ‘While I’m here I’ll just duck him through. Piece of cake.’ But he’d obviously had a rugged time with the other bulls in his rightful paddock and wasn’t keen to go back. I chased him around and around a couple of times, but he wasn’t going to have a bar of it. Eventually I became so frustrated I rammed his backside with the front of the bike. He didn’t like that much but it made me feel better. Then we weren’t far from the gate so I stopped. Tooting the horn and yelling like an overzealous footy fan, I waited for him to walk through.
He had other ideas. He turned his beady eyes towards me, dropped his head and charged. Here was this huge black bull, almost a tonne of powerful, angry muscle and bone closing in on me. As he got nearer the ground reverberated under his approaching hooves. I sat there hoping like hell he’d only shunt the bike back a bit. ‘As long as I hang on,’ I thought, ‘I’ll be all right.’
I totally underestimated him. I couldn’t believe the force as his skull slammed into the bullbar, bending the two-inch steel pipe. Then he lifted — that’s why they call rising share prices a ‘bull market’. I was witnessing a rise of astronomical proportions. He flung the bike backwards as if it was weightless, tossing me off the back like confetti. As I landed with a thump on the hard grey dirt, I had visions of three hundred kilos of metal bike crashing down on top of me.
Fortune was smiling on me that day, and the bike bounced, like a cat, back onto its four wheels. But the bull wasn’t finished. He came looking for me. Snorting and furious, he investigated his handiwork. I’m not sure if he pushed me or not. It all happened so quickly. Then, obviously satisfied I wouldn’t be disturbing him again, he trotted off down the fence — in the opposite direction to the gateway, of course.
Gingerly I checked to see if I was okay. With relief, I thought I was. So I bummed my way around beside the bike and climbed back on. I’d been heading for Bardin to do a couple of jobs, so I did that, then went home. By then I was feeling a bit off colour, but thought, ‘I’m just battered and bruised. Like I’ve done a couple of rounds with Mike Tyson. I’ll be all right.’
When Jenny arrived home I was sitting on the verandah. When I told her what had happened, she wasn’t surprised. She was worried I’d been hurt in my tussle with the bull that day, but I was positive I was okay.
By the next day I wasn’t so sure. I had a slight headache and felt I wasn’t sitting right. Off to the doctor we went and he sent me to have x-rays. The radiologist made the remark, ‘Thank God you’re in the position you’re in, because if you could feel pain like a normal person you’d be in agony. Your pelvis is fractured in three places.’
Four long and boring weeks in bed followed. It was bloody frustrating because I couldn’t do anything. Once I’d read The Land and Farm Machinery Deals from cover to cover, I’d resort to Women’s Weekly and when I was really desperate, one of Jenny’s horse magazines. I caught up with the latest on Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful, using a long stick to change the channels because our TV was too old for a remote.
My stint in bed took me back to my early weeks in the spinal unit — not a pleasant reminder. But I survived and I’ve never been so glad to feel the sun on my face and wind in my hair as I was when I got back on the bike again.
Our house is tucked away pretty well from the closest public road — as I’ve mentioned before, it’s five kilometres by predominantly blacksoil track. There are four small gullies plus Croppa Creek to cross. In the early days, when we only had my ute, twenty millimetres of rain was enough to turn the black soil into a slippery, boggy mess.
Later we progressed to a four-wheel drive, which meant we could churn in or out, but most of the time we preferred not to because it just damaged the road. Instead we often had rushed trips home trying to beat the rain.
One Saturday night we were at the Warialda Show. It’s always a great event because everyone comes out of the woodwork. We were having a ball, catching up with all our mates, taking very little notice of the light rain falling. But that quickly changed when the secretary came over to report that Mum was on the phone. We’d better leave, it was pouring down at home.
We had a forty-minute trip ahead of us, and about halfway we hit the rain. It bucketed down virtually the rest of the way home. It was coming down in sheets, leaving grey blankets of water across the roadway which shone in the headlights. We were in the ute, so we knew we couldn’t get to our house. Instead we went to Mum and Dad’s.
We could have stayed with them I guess, but we had animals to feed, so we thought we’d brave the journey in the wet. After all, it was a bit of an adventure. The only option was the four-wheel bike — by now Mum and Dad had one at their place too. They gave us raincoats. We strapped the wheelchair frame on the front, tied the wheels on the back and headed into the dark, pouring rain. What a bizarre sight it would have been — the wheelchair precariously balanced on the front, me trying to peer around it to see where I was going and Jenny hiding behind me trying to avoid the flying mud as much as possible.
It took us half an hour to get home. By the time we pulled into the sanctuary of our garage we were splattered from head to toe with black lumps of mud, many looking like they had tails formed by rivulets of water and dirt flowing down our faces and raincoats. We were like drowned rats. But we were warm inside and laughing so hard we were almost falling off the bike at the thought of how we must have looked.
Another time we got caught out when we’d been shopping, so we rode home on the bike with the esky tied on the back and bags of groceries hanging off the handlebars, plus the wheelchair. Sometimes these trips also included two or three dogs, all piled on top of each other and of course, the wheelchair. It was a real hillbilly turnout.
Rather than risk getting bogged in the car in the rain, we’d usually opt for the bike, but there were times when we’d chance it, which made Jenny very nervous. Jenny explains: ‘I always dreaded us getting bogged because I knew I’d be the one who would have to traipse home through the mud and slush, probably in my best shoes, to get Sam’s bike. And of course, by the time I’d retrieved him and his chair — and they’d both been dragged and pushed from the car to the bike — there would have been mud and water everywhere. I have visions of washing Sam down under the hose, because there’s no way I’d be letting him and his chair into the house covered in mud. Thankfully, so far it hasn’t happened.’
The access was all part of the fun and excitement of living in the bush. If Jenny had been a prima donna she probably wouldn’t have been happy on the back of the bike getting sprayed in mud and manure, or in the cattle yards covered in dust and flies. As it was, she took it in her stride.
There is one thing Jenny doesn’t like about our life. That’s the possibility of me coming off the bike. She says, ‘I sometimes wonder when Sam speeds off if I’ll see him again, especially after being involved in some of his little episodes. I worry about losing Sam but then I think, just be thankful for every day I have with him and hope like hell it doesn’t happen. He assures me he’s much tamer now than he used to be, so goodness knows what he was like before.’
It’s true that I am a lot more careful now I’ve got Jenny. It would devastate me if something happened to her, so I think she’d feel the same way if something happened to me. Before it didn’t seem to matter as much — while obviously my family would be sad, it’s not the same as losing your soulmate.
Now I don’t take the same risks when I’m in the creek. Like the other day, I thought about going across Croppa Creek when it was in flood. The water was about a metre deep. I wanted to check some cattle on the other side. Normally I would have had a go, but I thought, ‘No, if you don’t get across and you get washed away and drown, what about Jenny?’ So I take it a lot easier now. It’s probably an age thing too. I’m starting to feel the wear and tear on my body.
It doesn’t mean things don’t still happen. One day I was starting the pump. I’d worked out how I could back the bike up to the pump, fill it with fuel and pull start the engine. I’d swing my leg over the fuel tank of the bike and twist around, lying belly down on the back. This particular morning as I swung my leg back over the centre — the toe of my boot hit the accelerator and again it stuck. The bike took off like a bolting horse, throwing me onto the ground, and just kept going. It climbed up and over a ringlock fence — how it managed to do that without tipping over, I’ll never know — plunging across the road, down a gully and finally came to a halt, motor running, out of my sight. It was at least sixty metres away, which may as well have been the other side of the Sydney Harbour as far as I was concerned. What was I going to do?
Jenny was waiting for me at home and I was worried that if she came searching for me, she wouldn’t see me beside the pump. I was surrounded by huge variegated thistles, which towered over my head. ‘Shit,’ I thought, ‘I’ll have to get out onto the road.’ It was about twenty metres away. I found an old bit of pipe, about half the length of a broomstick, and set to the thistles like a man possessed. It certainly helped ease some of the frustration. I’d swipe a bit, bum my way forwards through the thorns and spikes, then swipe again, bum forwards, until I made it to the fence, my bare hands and arms a mass of red spots from the prickles. I forced up the netting, dragging myself underneath. Eventually I made it to the road, battered and grazed and a little worse for wear, but I made it.
I could hear Jenny calling over the two-way on the bike, ‘Sam, are you on channel? Are you on channel, Sam?’ A while later she drove down the road. It was a hell of a relief — it would have been a long way bumming my way to the bike. But I would have done it if I’d had to.
It would have been mind-boggling for Jenny to see me sitting on the road and the bike all the way down in the gully. She didn’t disagree: ‘I saw Sam in the distance, sitting on the road, and then as I got closer I noticed the bike. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how he’d ended up where he was and the bike all that distance away, on its wheels and still running.’
You’ll be pleased to know that after that incident, I finally got the accelerator on the bike fixed.
Then there was the time we both went down to fix a flood fence. Jenny was too short to reach the top of the iron post to hammer it in. So I’d reversed up to the post and she’d stood on the back of the bike. We’d done that many, many times. Jenny would hit one steel post in and then we’d move onto the next one. We made quite a team.
On this occasion the post was in the sandy bottom of Croppa Creek and the bike was on a slope. Jenny was hammering the post in with a rock. I turned around on the bike to watch and thought I’d pinch Jenny’s bum, as you do. But as I reached around with my hand I lost my balance and fell forward onto the accelerator. The bike was in reverse and leapt into life, bucking Jenny off the side as it catapulted over the iron post. It was in sand so it didn’t provide much resistance. The bike kept going backwards into a shallow waterhole surrounded by low bottlebrush trees.
Jenny said, ‘I’ll never forget the sight of Sam and the bike lurching back into the branches of the bottle trees. He looked like he was going to get swallowed up. I wondered when he was going to stop and if he’d be okay when he did. I must admit, it sent me into a panic — it’s much worse to be watching than experiencing it yourself. Sam was too busy just hanging on.’
The bike eventually tipped on the sloping ground and came to a spluttering halt on its side, depositing me in the muddy bog hole, one leg caught underneath. I wasn’t hurt and Jenny helped me crawl out. I was covered from head to toe down one side in sticky, smelly goo — like a pig in mud. What a sight.
The big dilemma then was how to get the bike back on its wheels. It wasn’t possible for Jenny to lift it by herself. And time was running out because it was late afternoon and would soon be dark. I told Jenny to race back to the house and get some rope, wire and the wire strainers. There was a tree trunk just above the bike, which we could use to lever the bike back up onto its wheels. Jenny took off up the steep creek bank like a hare with a dog on its tail.
She recalled, ‘And as I was going up over the bank I heard Sam yell out after me, ‘And bring back the camera. This might be one for the book.’ I’d just watched Sam almost kill himself and there he was telling me to take photographs!’
Jenny ran most of the two or three kilometres home, loaded up the car and was back in under half an hour. She winched the bike back onto its wheels. Miraculously it was relatively unscathed, with only a couple of small scratches and looking like it had been given a muddy paint job on one side. I climbed back on it and amazingly it started. We fixed the fence and made it home shortly before dark.
I’ve never lost the feeling of helplessness I get when I come off my bike or out of my chair. When I’m lying on the floor or ground and it’s such a struggle just to sit up, it’s a powerful reminder of how incapacitated I really am. Sometimes I forget, especially if I haven’t had a buster for a while. But it all comes flooding home to me when I’m trying to lift eighty kilos of virtually dead weight back up onto my bike or into my chair.
Another thing I’ve never got used to is Jenny going away. I miss her desperately and feel terribly lonely, even if she’s away for only one day. Like an apple without its core. In fact, as soon as she leaves I can’t wait for her to return, and when she’s back, I appreciate her even more.
It’s not so much that I can’t survive for a few days on my own. I can. But occasionally something goes pear-shaped, like it did the very first time Jenny went away after we were married. We were still sleeping in Jenny’s old brass bed and one night I went to transfer onto it and the whole timber base under the mattress dropped through the frame. My legs flew up in the air and I fell backwards down the steep slope formed by the mattress. I lay there like a see-saw, with my head at the lower end and my feet at the top. After quite a struggle, I eventually rolled my whole body down to the bottom and crawled, painstakingly, under the rectangular frame of the bed. I had no alternative; I couldn’t get over the top.
Twenty long minutes later I was finally free and thought, ‘What am I going to do now?’ With a fair bit of heaving I managed to drag the mattress under the frame behind me and away from the bed. It was such a drama, but I didn’t have any choice. There weren’t any other beds set up in the house at that stage and I was very aware of the threat of pressure sores, so I couldn’t just curl up on the carpet. I grabbed the doona, got on the mattress and went to sleep.
Next morning I had to bum my way over to the bed to grab my clothes, then back to the mattress to get dressed, then back to the bed to climb into my chair. I was very pleased when Jenny arrived back home, I can tell you.
A couple of times I have also fallen off my bath bench when Jenny wasn’t here, and one night I flipped myself in my wheelchair while in the bathroom, getting my feet caught under the lip of the hand basin. I was stuck. That one had me worried there for a while, but I eventually managed to wriggle around enough to get my feet free.
Jenny worries when she goes away: ‘I think the pressure is probably felt more by the people around Sam, like me and his parents. We never quite stop wondering if he is okay and every night I call just to make sure.’
Jenny and I have been married now for more than seven years. And I fall more in love with her every day. No one ever told me that happens. She’s made me so happy because I’ve found my best mate and we are made for each other. It’s such an amazing thing to find your soulmate and spend virtually every minute together, to share similar passions and have so much in common. Sometimes I ask myself, ‘What if I’d never found her?’ I imagine what my life would have been like and what I’d have missed out on. It scares me. But of course, if I hadn’t met Jenny, I would never have known how good life could be.
I probably appreciate our relationship more than most couples do because I waited so long and thought it would never happen. And Jenny has made such a huge difference to my life because I’m disabled. But I also believe in being grateful. Sometimes you’ve got to sit and smell the flowers and I don’t think a lot of people do. They tear through life and don’t put a lot of value on where they live, their wife, husband or kids. They don’t value the fact they have clean drinking water, food on the table, can watch the sun come up in the morning and walk free on the streets.
The only regret I have is that I didn’t find Jenny ten years earlier.