Intrepid Paper Girl

Here’s an update on Vanessa “Mama V” Carpenter, the Roanoke County missionary who has “a whole country to mother” in Haiti: She flew to Port-au-Prince on Jan. 18 and has since then been helping the USNS Comfort coordinate surgeries. Judging from her frenetic blog postings, she’s on a souped-up version of her usual overdrive — too busy to document what she sees around her, but eager for people to know all the needs.

Rescue workers are sending the worst cases to the Comfort, a Naval ship Mama V has long been affiliated with. Its commanding officer told me last spring that she was “like some character out of a movie,” able to navigate the bureaucracy in Haiti while bridging the cultural gap between the Haitians and the Americans who man the boat.

But as Mama V posted on her blog last week: “Working in Haiti was hard before the devastation. Now it is next to impossible.”

“I know you are seeing bad things on the news and reports of looting. We are seeing none of this. Just adults and children in shock,” she added.

Mama V’s helpers in Roanoke are busy trying to find host families who are willing to temporarily foster a child when Angel Missions resumes flying them back to Roanoke for surgeries too complex to perform on the ship — missions she’s been coordinating for several years now, as documented in my Mother’s Day story last year. For more information on that, or to donate to Angel Missions, check out her blog.

There’s also a great tale about Vanessa’s efforts to work with American Airlines flight attendants who fly in and out of Haiti, resulting in another project to help the devastated country. This, from a woman who once talked a stranger sitting next to her on the airplane to Port-au-Prince to fund a clinic there.

The numbers are not yet tallied, but the deaths could top 200,000. Dominican novelist Junot Diaz called the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated Haiti nothing short of an apocalypse. “The numbers are abstractions to us,” he said at a Harvard symposium last week. “The U.S. lost 60,000 soldiers in Vietnam, and yet that war haunts this nation still.”

The Pulitzer-winning author’s point: That we can’t imagine the unspeakable pain in Haiti. He spoke at a symposium co-sponsored by Harvard’s Committee on African Studies and the DuBois Institute, part of a panel that also included doctors Marie-Louise Jean-Baptiste and Jennifer Leaning, and public-health crisis experts Gregg Greenough and Patrick Sylvain. The Barker Center meeting hall was packed with students, activists and scholars alike. Some nuggets from the talk:

• That the Dominican Republic’s aid and solidarity on behalf of Haiti surprised people like Diaz, who recalled the 1937 genocide of Haitians by Dominicans and the complicated, racist history between them that existed for most of the past century.

• Diaz: “We belong to a civilization that seems quite happy having a nation of people so close living in such misery that an earthquake could put the entire nation — not just the bodies — at risk.” When the audience burst into applause at this comment, he chided, “There’s too much work to be done for clapping.”

• 40 percent of Haitians have never had any health care whatsoever, and only half of the country’s children have been immunized against measles, Greenough reported. Among the biggest risks he foresees is the spread of measles, malaria and Denghe amid the 450 camps set up for the displaced.

• Leaning said she was particularly worried about children who are orphaned and/or separated from their parents. “They’re very vulnerable to slavery, abuse, precipitous adoption. . . . . As well-meaning as adoptive parents think they are, we need to help adults in Haiti take care of the children there.” She said this within hours of the arrest of several members of an Idaho Baptist church for trafficking as they tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the country.

• Jean-Baptiste, a Haitian-born Cambridge physician, described a a 56-year-old Haitian woman who can’t sleep or concentrate to work since the earthquake (Boston has the third largest Haitian population in the United States). The woman lost one of her three children to the earthquake, and a second child has been displaced. “There’s nobody I know from Haiti who hasn’t lost a family member, a close friend or neighbor,” Jean-Baptiste added.

Haitian immigrants are always thinking about Haiti and going back, many of them building houses with remittances they send home rather than saving up for retirement here, panelists explained. Many of those houses have been destroyed, so “this is a human tragedy with physical and mental health losses and financial losses,” Jean-Baptiste said, adding that Haitians have a strong stigma against seeking counseling or psychiatric care. “Remember, PTSD doesn’t only last a year; this is something that will be with people for a very long time.”

Sylvain fears that by March people will be so hungry and destitute they might resort to taking food by force in the countryside. “You’re seeing a reverse migration with some people returning to the countryside but without the necessary support there or kinship established.” He fears the country’s renewed friendship with the D.R. could be jeopardized by so many Haitians’ moving closer to the border. “There are just so many waves of potential for people getting even more distressed,” he said.

As Paul Farmer put it in his recent Miami Herald editorial: “A plane full of requested personnel and supplies circling overhead while people die is the right metaphor for the challenges facing us.”

I thought of Mama V as soon as I heard the news. I knew she’d be fighting the urge to fly to Port-au-Prince — that is, if she wasn’t already there.

Vanessa Carpenter runs a medical mission in Haiti from an unlikely place: a suburban two-story in western Roanoke County. Photographer Jeanna Duerscherl and I spent weeks following her last year for a Mother’s Day story about her life’s work: helping underprivileged children. Mama V spends an average of a week a month in Haiti, and not a day goes by when she isn’t there in spirit and on the phone, coordinating life-saving surgeries and fundraising and generally trying to help people compensate for the fallout of being born in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

She started out in southside Chicago, fostering and later adopting crack- and alcohol-addicted babies that no one else was willing to take on; some of whom were not expected to live; some of whom cried 22 out of 24 hours a day. Those children now do things like go to college and sing in the Roanoke College children’s choir.

Several years back, a friend in Chicago asked Mama V to join her on a mission trip to Haiti, a visit that Tom Carpenter would come to call the beginning of “her latest frontier in mothering.”

“What state is that in?” Carpenter wanted to know.

Since that first trip in 1999, Carpenter has coordinated thousands of surgeries for children in makeshift surgery centers and aboard U.S. military boats. She’s talked dozens of Roanoke surgeons into donating their time to the Haitian kids she flies here because their conditions are too complex for Haitian surgeries. She’s talked airlines and God-only-knows-who-else into pitching in for supplies, airfare, housing and anything else she thinks these sick, scared children might need when they’re thousands of miles from their homes and, often, their families.

Initially set up to coordinate life-saving surgeries for Haitian babies in the United States, Angel Missions Haiti now includes three medical clinics in Port-au-Prince including a surgery center. Mama V told my Roanoke Times colleague Matt Chittum this morning that at least one of the mission’s buildings — an eight-story shelter for street children — collapsed in yesterday’s earthquake.

“She’s moving mountains, one stone at a time,” Moneta physician Kitty Humphreys said, not unlike the amazing Cambridge humanitarian Dr. Paul Farmer, the subject of Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” (Here’s an update on what his organization, Partners in Health, is doing in response to the earthquake.) ”It’s like she’s got a whole country to mother.”

Mama V will be moving those same mountains in the months ahead, as the country struggles to dig itself out. If you’d like to be part of that effort, tax-deductible donations to her mission can be made through her Web site. You can follow helpers in Port-au-Prince, too, via her Angel Missions blog.

I’ve watched this lady in action: stuffing cans of Enfamil into her carry-on bags; pleading relentlessly with bureaucrats about visas and surgeries and military rules. What I mean to say here is this: Mama V is the real deal. I have no doubt that any donation to this organization will be money well-spent.

WHITE STONE — Hope Reese works as an events assistant for the Nieman Foundation.  I can say without certainty after spending five months hanging around the place: She’s the glue of the organization — the person all the fellows go to when they need help with anything, including recommendations for the Three B’s: bands, bars and bargains. She’s enthusiastic and generous, and she gets more done in a day than most of us do in a week.

So when the opportunity arose recently for me to pay her back for the few thousand favors I already owe her, I leapt. She wanted to visit Williamsburg, Va., where her grandmother and namesake worked as a journalist for The Virginia Gazette in the ’70s and ’80s. Her grandmother Hope passed away when Hope was just 10, long before her interested in journalism was sparked, so Hope Junior wanted to do find out about Hope Senior’s career and the influence she’d had on young journalists of her day.

I happen to have an uncle Frosty with a beautiful (and, happily for us, available) river house in White Stone, Va., an hour or so away from Williamsburg, and so I also jumped at the chance to have some quiet writing time here while Hope was off doing her thing. A bargain-hunter extraordinaire — she’s addicted to a Web site called Groupon, such that she’s even achieved “Groupie” status — Hope even found us a cheap flight on Air Tran to Newport News ($59 each way), where we rented a shiny red tin can (Nissan Versa) for four days.

I’ve never been to the river in winter before, so I’m glad I’ve finally had the chance — even if it did take forever to get to sleep last night in Frosty’s spooky, creaky 200-year-old house all by my lonesome. (Hope was away at a friend’s house in Williamsburg for the night.)

It was too cold to go kayaking today — not sure I can get used to seeing snow on the beach! — but after six hours of writing I managed a 40-minute walk along the Rappahannock, which is lovely this time of year and easier to navigate somehow without running into marshland or other people’s piers, as is usually the case. Somehow, some way, and don’t ask me to explain it, but the shoreline has thickened up, allowing a wider berth for beach-walking than usual. I was able to walk most of the way to Windmill Pointe, where I scared a heron perched in the marsh — and it definitely scared me.

By the time I returned, the miracle knead-free bread that Hope had started before she left — it requires a first rising of 18 hours! — was ready to bake. A sublime creation, it has a perfectly crunchy/chewy crust, thanks to the cornmeal and the cast-iron skillet I baked it in. (Ideally, you’d bake it in a cast-iron Le Creuset, a Dutch oven. But you gotta deal with the cookware you’re dealt.) A Mark Bittman recipe (you can watch his New York Times video here), it’s holey and wondrous — perfect for the pooling of butter — not unlike ciabatta, only without much effort.

Hope’s Miracle Bread

3 cups flour

Teaspoon or so of salt

Half-packet of yeast

1 5/8 cup of water

In a glass mixing bowl, combine ingredients and stir, but don’t overwork. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit for 18 hours.

Sprinkle a little more flour on top, then lay down a tea towel on the counter and sprinkle it with a liberal handful of cornmeal. Place the dough on top of the cornmeal-topped towel and put plastic wrap over top for 15 minutes.

After 2 1/2 hours, preheat the oven with the cast-iron Dutch oven inside for 30 minutes. (Hope said not to oil the pan, but I didn’t believe her and did it anyway.)

Being careful not to burn yourself, pull out the oven rack, remove the lid and then carefully nudge the dough from the tea towel into the pot. Shake dough around ever-so-slightly so that it evens out a bit. Return lid and bake at 450 for a half-hour, then remove the lid, and bake a half-hour more.

When the bread-making wunderkind texts (or is it textes?) you to make sure you’ve done everything according to her strict instruction, tell her: Yeah, you got it. And save her a piece or two.

Oh, and check out Hope’s new blog here for updates on her namesake project.

An article in today’s Washington Post helped kick-start my re-entry into the world of home care for the elderly, the subject of my Nieman year research. It also led me to the story of an amazing woman named Evelyn Coke. The Jamaican-born immigrant was a long-time home care worker in Queens, New York, where she ministered to the frail elderly in their homes, often working more than 70 hours a week. For $7 an hour.

I’ve spent a lot of time with home care workers in the past two years, and I know they tend to be overwhelmingly low-income, female and minority — half, in fact, earn so little that they must rely on food stamps, and most either aren’t offered health insurance or don’t earn enough to be able to afford it even if it is offered. I also know that the good ones tend to view their work as a calling.

What I didn’t know, though, until I read about Evelyn is this: Due to a 1975 loophole in a Labor Department regulation, the nation’s 1.4 million home care workers are exempt from overtime and minimum wage requirement protections outlined in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.

Evelyn tried to change all that in 2001 when, working for a Long Island home care company, she sued her agency in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2003, the court sided with the Bush and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg administrations, both of which filed friend-of-court briefs saying that paying the aides more would bankrupt companies and ultimately lead to greater institutionalization of seniors. Unlike the Lily Ledbetter case, this one didn’t rally most women’s groups.

Because she didn’t have health insurance, Evelyn put off going to the doctor until she was 65 and qualified for Medicare. By that time, her kidneys were failing. She died last August due to complications from a serious bedsore, the kind she had once been so good at tending. Having been denied justice by the court, her son explained, she had not been able to afford a home care worker in her final days.

Home care is a growing industry in a rapidly aging society, with expectations for the employment of 2 million home care workers by 2014. (The Labor Department says the only faster growing occupation is systems and data analysts.)

We don’t need data analysts to tell us that the United States is headed toward a long-term care catastrophe if it doesn’t give more credence to the work of these women — and the patients they care for — as it cobbles together health-care reform. (For more information, check out a very recent article in the journal Health Affairs on the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s efforts to weave long-term care into current legislation.)

Would that Florence Nightingale have been more prescient when she wrote in 1867: “My view you know, is that the ultimate destination of all nursing is the nursing of the sick in their own homes. . . . I look to the abolition of all [institutions such as hospitals and nursing facilities]. . . . But no use to talk about the year 2000.”

Photo by Josh Meltzer | Roanoke Times, December 2007

I was home in Roanoke for Christmas, just about to dive into presents at our uncle’s house when I noticed a voicemail on my phone: Tommy Rhodes had died an hour before, and his wife, Linda, had wanted me to know.

We knew it would probably happen before the year was out, Linda and I, which is why I had already written most of his obituary (which follows below) before I left my newspaper in August, with her blessing. “There’ll be just one more story,” she told me. “The last one.”

So it was that I sadly wrote the ending to a story I’d been following for the better part of two years — ever since Linda and I met at the Adult Care Center of Roanoke Valley in the fall of 2007, and she agreed to let me into her life. She’d already been on the caregiving journey for five years at that point and was struggling, she admitted, to keep Tommy at home. When the time came to put him in a nursing home, how would she know it was the right thing to do? What I proceeded to witness for the next several months would astonish me. Her devotion, chronicled in a March 2008 story, astonished droves of readers, too: Friends she hadn’t seen in years volunteered to mow her grass; strangers accosted her at CVS and in the dentist’s office, saying, “You’re that lady in the paper, aren’t you?” And: “You’re amazing.”

One reader donated a bidet after reading that Linda needed one to help with Tommy’s toileting. After an end-of year-update nine months later revealed that she was trying to sell her house — in order to pay her home-care aide, at a pricetag that’s well beyond the reach of most middle-class families — a reader in Stuart mailed me a $700 check to give to her. Linda was floored.

My aunt Barbara told me once that she admired the way I “fall in love” with my subjects. That’s not my goal, of course, but it happens, especially when it’s someone as honest and down-to-earth and smart as Linda Rhodes. I’ve learned that in order to render the intimate details of a person’s live, you got to get in there deep and talk about the hard stuff, like what it was like not to dial 9-1-1 the night she thought he was dying and what she said the day he’d gotten himself kicked out of day care for kicking another patient. Columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote that empathy is the key to human understanding, and that’s my simple goal: to understand a person or a situation so well that I can render it fully. I can’t help it if falling in love is sometimes a byproduct.

Last summer, when the “Age of Uncertainty” team won a national award for the series — much of it due to the Linda Rhodes’ story — we turned the check over to her, a small way to say thanks. Again, she was floored. And then she went out and did something that shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone: She spent the most of the money buying us gifts.

Dec. 27, 2009

The Roanoke Times

It was not the ending that Linda Rhodes had wished for her husband, Tommy, who died Christmas Day at the Virginia Veterans Care Center.

If she’d had her way, she would have kept Tommy in the Williamson Road-area home they shared for decades. Her struggle, documented in The Roanoke Times’ 2008 “Age of Uncertainty” series, illustrated the demands of dementia on caregivers, especially on younger ones such as Linda who still work full time.

For almost eight years, Linda was determined not to place her husband of 41 years, who had severe dementia, in a nursing home. But her body had ideas of its own: a herniated disc, an inflamed Achilles tendon and a knee whose cartilage was worn beyond repair.

“You’re a surgeon’s nightmare,” her doctor told her.

Back in April, in preparation for her second surgery of the year, she finally took the myriad advice she was given — by doctors and relatives, by friends and strangers alike — and placed Tommy in a nursing home.

She said she knew how Moses’ mother must have felt when she put her baby in a basket and sent him adrift amid the Nile River reeds. “She had to do what was best for him, not what was best for her.”

‘I have no choice’

She had put their house on the market in fall 2008 in hopes of using the proceeds to pay for Tommy’s in-home care, which cost about two-thirds of her take-home pay. After a series of unreliable sitters, she finally found home-care aide Latoya Davis, who was as good with Tommy as she was.

But with the real-estate market in the pits, she took the house off the market earlier this year. She moved their bedroom downstairs in preparation for her first surgery, to repair her Achilles, and paid Davis overtime to help them both during her recovery.

It wasn’t ideal, she conceded, especially at night when Davis wasn’t there. Tommy fell one night after slipping in the bathroom. With a brace on her foot, Linda caught him as he fell, wedging himself between the bathtub and the wall.

The disease progressed and, by spring, Tommy had forgotten how to sit down. When he did get up, he’d walk around the house for four, sometimes five hours at a time. He needed help getting out of bed, too — something Linda’s bad back could not accommodate.

“I probably could’ve done it a couple of months sooner, but I just wasn’t ready,” she said, referring to moving him to a nursing home. “Sometimes I think God sends you what you need. If I hadn’t physically gone to hell, I’d might still be trying to make it work at home.”

During his first several weeks at the veterans care center, Linda visited Tommy before and after work. Most days she took her lunch hour from Lewis-Gale Medical Center to drive over and feed him.

People whisperer

Charge nurse Jessica Nichols said family members of other patients were “mesmerized” by Linda’s ability to manage Tommy at home for as long as she had. “She taught us her tricks,” Nichols said, adding that Linda typically noticed changes in Tommy’s behavior before the staff did.

Linda cringed when Tommy fell twice during his first week there. But she worked with staffers to develop a timing plan for his medications and a regimen that called for an aide to be present whenever he got up or down.

She wasn’t sure Tommy recognized her during her visits, although one time he lit up when she walked in and pointed her out to the activities director, saying: “There’s my wife.”

She was a hit with other residents, too. One man told her he was scared because “my daddy’s coming to kill me” — until Linda assured him that she’d locked the doors and he was safe. Another wanted to know if he could follow Linda as she pushed Tommy in a wheelchair through the “wandering garden,” an outdoor space for dementia residents.

“I feel like the horse whisperer — except with people,” she joked.

Alone at home at night, she couldn’t get used to the silence, sometimes thinking she heard phantom snores from the den where he’d napped.

But two months into his nursing home stay, she made a bitter kind of peace with the arrangement. “I’m 100 percent happy with his care at the nursing home,” she said in July. “But I’m 110 percent sure I’d rather have him at home.”

No bad memories

As he entered the last phase of the neurodegenerative brain disease that would take his life, Tommy Rhodes began to have trouble swallowing. One night, as his wife spoon-fed his pureed lasagna and garlic bread, he pushed her spoon away and said, “Get that damn thing outta here.”

Linda smiled, waited a few seconds and offered the spoonful again. He ate. The ritual repeated itself until the food was gone, then Linda wiped his mouth with his bib.

For several weeks this summer, Linda recovered from her second surgery, a knee-replacement operation, and could not visit Tommy at all. It was the longest period of time in their marriage that they had been apart.

She had long worried that when her husband died she would only be able to remember the care-giving catastrophes that encompassed the last seven years of their life together– the sleepless nights, the bathing and toileting disasters, the time he got kicked out of the Adult Care Center for kicking another patient and Linda, all teary and exasperated, asked him: “Now what are we gonna do?”

But during her month recuperating from the knee replacement, she said she enjoyed looking back on their life together: the way he always sat by her at large family gatherings, the way he surprised her when she came back from a beach trip with the kids by hiding behind the door.

“I can honestly say that, before this, I don’t have a bad memory of Tommy and I together. Not one.”

‘Remember him this way’

Things normalized for most of the fall, with Linda stopping by the care center to feed Tommy before and after work.

By mid-December, though, his brain had begun its final shutdown.

“The nurse asked me this week if I would consider a feeding tube,” Linda wrote in an e-mail Wednesday. “No, no, no.”

She related a recent exchange she’d had a few weeks earlier, when after feeding Tommy, he took her hand and with great concentration put it to his face, rubbed his cheeks and kissed her fingers. For fleeting moments, she knew, her man was still in there.

“He was really struggling [to breathe] at the end,” said her daughter-in-law Beth Rhodes, who offered to sit with her in his final days. But Linda wanted to handle it alone, with the help of the center’s staff and morphine to ease her husband’s pain. Their three children and eight grandchildren came by on Christmas Eve to say goodbye.

Tommy Rhodes died on Christmas Day with his wife at his side. He was 70.

On her Facebook page, Linda posted a picture of her husband from earlier times, his baby blues twinkling not unlike the first time she glimpsed him, in his 20s, driving down Williamson Road. “Remember him this way,” she wrote.

“Finally, after almost eight years, my beloved is at peace.”

Linda Rhodes will host a celebration of Tommy’s life from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, on what would have been Tommy’s 71st birthday, at Friendship Retirement Community’s Residents Center.

The last time I saw her, in June, she took me to lunch to celebrate my fellowship. She was in stage four of the non-smoker kind of lung cancer that would soon steal her life. Her eyelashes were singed from the treatments. She walked slowly, stopping every few steps to catch her breath. She joked that finally she had lost that 15 pounds she’d been trying for years to shed, but dammit: Food no longer tasted good.

We knew it would probably be our last visit, but she didn’t make a fuss. A big hug at the end, some awkward words from me and that glorious eye-twinkling smile of hers, letting me knowing that, yes, this did seriously suck — but she had made peace with it. Now all she had to do was convince her loved ones they’d be OK too.

She worried about her daughter, Sarah, whom she’d raised on her own through the rough times and the good and who always — no matter how dicey things got — would make her beam, shake her head and say, “Yep, that’s my girl!” She had the closest sibling relationship with her sister, Susan, that I have ever seen. Her best friends were her ministers, Bob and Dusty. Her secretary Carolyn loved her so much she would have taken the cancer for her if she could.

As friends go, we could go months without e-mailing or visiting, and pick up right where we left off. We were lunch buddies — sometimes quarterly, sometimes twice a year. She liked that Italian place on Route 11 just north of Hollins that doubled as a gas station, especially on spaghetti day.

She was the kind of person you could cry in front of, and she wouldn’t turn it into some big dramatic deal. She was full of kid-rearing advice that wasn’t exactly out of the parenting books. It was the kind of stuff you could actually follow, like let your kid be who he’s meant to be and, if you can help it, try not to freak out. If he’s four years old and wants to wear ruby slippers to preschool, break out the glue gun and sequins. She accepted people with a full heart and reveled in their quirks. At the end of every lunch, I invited her to bill me for the free therapy.

She could do amazing things with a canister of crescent rolls and a block of cream cheese. Her white-bean chicken chili was simple and crockpot-ready, meaning she wasn’t above throwing in a can of cream-of-chicken soup and calling it a day. When Heironimus closed its doors a few years back, she stopped by to thank the hair-netted ladies at the cafe, all of whom she knew by name. She swore they made the best chicken salad in the world.

She had a gift for language that was Flannery O’Connor meets “Fried Green Tomatoes” meets Quentin Tarantino and by that I mean, she was a Southern lady through and through and she could cuss and talk about sex, though sometimes she whispered when she did. At Hollins University, where she ran the career center and led a course called “life planning,” she taught god-knows-how-many students of a “nontraditional” age that, yes, they could go to college and, yes, they could get better jobs and, hell yes, they could make it on their own because, if she could do it, they could too.

To my knowledge, she never left her condo without a careful application of lipstick and tissues in her purse. Not once did she fail to ask to see a picture of my kids.

Tina Rolen died Friday at the age of 60, leaving behind a lot of people who aren’t going to know what to do. Her friend Jan, the Hollins chaplain, told me she saw Tina the night before she died; that she was peaceful, awake and semi-alert but that she seemed to be looking somewhere else, at a different horizon.

Tina always did know where she was going, and she never minded the journey, not even the occasional detour or flat tire. She usually came back with a funny story and a tip about some great new food she’d tried and, before you knew it, you’d be laughing so hard you were crying and making plans to meet there for lunch.

We are so not the kind of people who charge all-inclusive resort trips on their home equity lines in the middle of a recession. Really, we’re not.

And yet. . . here’s an audio slideshow, from our recent trip to  Jamaica, where the preteen drank dozens of “free” virgin pina coladas and led sessions of afternoon volleyball in the pool.

Sadly, by the time we arrived back in Cambridge, the bill was awaiting. But that’s OK. This one was for the kids — a guilt trip, to be honest, to make up for uprooting them from their friends and schools in Roanoke. They’re used to complaining about our more typical cheap-O vacations where we drive everywhere (“Who drives to Canada from Virginia?!”) and camp (“I can’t even get a text!”) and stay with friends and relatives along the way.

As we were leaving the resort on Sunday, the teenager wanted to know: “If we took all our money and sold our house and everything, how long do you think we could live here?”