Happy Tales: How to Manage Stress and Find Peace and Joy

By Diane de Mere

After moving to Seattle in 2004, I was searching for ways to manage stress and find peace and joy. This story is set against a background of changing careers and relationships with elderly parents, with wonderful animal stories along the way. It is a story about living in nature in the Pacific Northwest with bald eagles (Abby and Abe), loons, otters, deer, and orcas. You'll read about the antics of our two rescued malamutes, King and Sabre, and our trip to Seattle from Los Angles via RV with our rescued dog, Annie, and rescued cats.

This book is a compilation of thoughts, daydreams, poems, and notes in a journal spanning ten years. The immense beauty that surrounded me became the force that helped me transition from being a successful but stressed-out corporate trainer to the person I wanted to be: someone who was able to handle the stress of frustrations, demands, disappointments, and personalities. It is an open monologue of what I did and how I did it.

For you, my journal is meant as an example of how to find peace, laughter, and beauty in your day. It is a shining patha lighted journey we can choose to follow that lifts us upward and onward with hope, faith, love, and peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jan 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512768244

Diane de Mere

Diane, a success trainer and motivational speaker from 1994 to 2004, taught leadership and communication skills and motivation and image that were all based on values and ethics. Her clients included Fortune 500 companies and colleges. From 2004 to 2014, she researched stress management, making a career and location move from Los Angeles to Seattle. The result is this book, documenting her journey. She lives in Washington State with her husband and rescued pets—Sabre, their malamute/shepherd dog and Frankie, their cat.

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Copyright © 2017 Diane de Mere.

Image credit: Weinberger Photography

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5127-6825-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-6826-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-6824-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016920740

WestBow Press rev. date: 1/3/2017

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 A New Chapter in Life: A House on Puget Sound

Chapter 2 Along the New Path

Chapter 3 Pursuing the New Path and Finding Where It Leads

Chapter 4 Bumps in the Road and Making Decisions: Choosing the Next Chapter

Chapter 5 Refuge: Immersing Myself in His Grace and Beauty

Chapter 6 The Glory of the Path, and Another Bump in the Road

Chapter 7 Settling into a Rhythm

Chapter 8 Pushing Onward: Keeping My Boundaries

Chapter 9 The Miracle of Life

Summary and Lessons Learned

Tips for Handling Stress

Recommended Reading

Nonprofit Organizations

Outtakes—Just Happy Tails!

And the Saga Continues

To

Andrea and Bob, who watched over our place for five months before we were able to move to Whidbey and who shared with us the love of living on Puget Sound

Patricia, for helping us buy our home on the mainland and six years later helping us sell and buy on Whidbey Island

Brian and his family, for trying to help my father find his way

Janet, for her sense of humor, intelligence, and friendship

Val and David, for helping me along the way

Katy, for being my trusted assistant during change

Delmar Gardens and Pathways Hospice for their outstanding care and understanding in taking care of Dad

My parents for giving me a strong set of values and raising me in the church

My husband for his love, understanding, and encouragement

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank Andrea for taking the time to read my first draft and giving me the kindest encouragement to proceed and publish it. If all of our friends were that loving, what a world it would be!

A special thank-you to WestBow Press for considering my work for publication. Wes LeRoy, my first contact, is so many wonderful things wrapped up into one outstanding individual. He listened, understood my message, helped me work through my fear of publishing for the first time, and opened up to me about his own endeavors, hopes, and fears. Thank you to Tim Fitch, Jeff Slone, and Alex Stine, who answered all my questions and helped me get through the online submission process. They explained so much in a timely manner, helped me stay on track and move forward. Thank you to A. Spencer, editor for WestBow Press, who did an outstanding job in the line edit of my manuscript and was careful not to change my voice or style. The line edit is worth every dollar, and as I went through each annotation, I learned so much. This edit made my manuscript less wordy, more clear, and more impactful. As I’ve stepped through each suggested change, my writing has become better and more professional. Thank you to Bob DeGroff and the design team for the cover and interior layouts. They all exceeded my hopes and dreams. Thank you to Rebecca Hogue in marketing for her professional analysis and plan for launching this book.

INTRODUCTION

This is a story of adventure and joy in life. After moving to Seattle, I was searching for ways to manage stress and find peace and joy. What I found was myself and my own strength. This story is set against a background of changing careers and relationships with elderly parents, with wonderful animal stories along the way. It is a story about living in nature in the Pacific Northwest with bald eagles (Abby and Abe), loons, otters, deer, and orcas. You’ll read about the antics of our two rescued malamutes, King and Sabre, and our trip to Seattle from Los Angeles via RV with our rescued dog, Annie, and rescued cats. This is a story about endurance, patience, persistence, and finding one’s way through nature and the belief in a Higher Being. It is a story about life, something that we all share.

This book is a compilation of thoughts, daydreams, poems, and notes in a journal spanning ten years since my 2004 move to the Pacific Northwest with my husband. It is a description of the immense beauty I saw here every day, among these forests, waters, and wildlife. That beauty became the force that helped me transition from being a successful but stressed-out corporate trainer for ten years in Los Angeles to the person I wanted and needed to be: someone who was able to handle the stress of frustrations, demands, disappointments, and personalities. It is an open monologue of what I did and how I did it.

This journal began as a backdrop, written in quiet moments between nights of praying for God’s help; nights and days shattered by emergency phone calls about aging parents and my husband’s all-consuming career; nights filled with mental dialogue recounting the previous day’s jolting events and my mind’s what-ifs and what-nexts—an unending phonograph of thoughts. But the astounding beauty and surprising little events in nature and the companionship and antics of my malamutes became my respite and now my rejoicing song of life.

As a success trainer and motivational speaker in Los Angeles from 1994 to 2004, I had been teaching my clients leadership and communication skills, motivation, and image, all based on values and ethics. Since I had arrived in Los Angeles in 1994 not knowing anyone, I had worked hard at networking and placing ads for my services. Slowly, through repeat customers, referrals, and new clients, I built my business.

In 2004, when my husband got an offer to relocate with his career to Seattle, I was working seven days a week and had a very busy speaking and teaching career; however, I was getting burned out. I could not make myself take a break, and I really needed rest. Ironically, a local college had booked me to teach a class on stress management. I taught what I had researched and what I knew to be true about managing stress, but over the next days and weeks, I knew I was not following the rules.

Upon arriving in Seattle, I chose not to continue my career. Convinced I needed—both mentally and physically—to practice what I had been teaching, I began my new life. It did not come easy. While I walked every day and kept up a positive internal dialogue with myself, I always had a nagging urge to go back to my career, because it was what I had been doing successfully and instinctively for the previous ten years.

Slowly, the transitions took place from being fast-paced to slower paced; stressed out and yelling at my husband to being more calm; nervous to at ease; sleepless to more rested; and racing, shallow heartbeats to slower, deeper breathing. I was able to make myself schedule less in a day instead of filling every minute of every hour with activity, not allowing for any downtime in between. Along the way, I have found that I love doing landscape and home renovation projects. I have designed a new, part-time, slower-paced career I can share with my husband, along with photography and writing.

For you, my journal is meant as an example of how to find peace, serenity, laughter, and beauty in your day. A shining path, a lighted journey has been given to me, and I give it to you. It is a path we can choose to follow that lifts us upward and onward with hope, faith, love, and peace. I am uplifted, hopeful, and forever faithful, going forward to tomorrow, at peace in this moment. I am grateful for the gifts the Creator has given me, and I hope to live each day in wonder at His grace and the beauty of nature around me. He provides joy in peace and beauty. He provides hope and love for each day.

CHAPTER 1

A NEW CHAPTER IN LIFE: A HOUSE ON PUGET SOUND

September 21, 2004. A quiet water community in Seattle––a new chapter in our lives. We’ve been here three and a half weeks, and I love it. Today has been one of the clearest, most beautiful and calm days. At nine this morning, I strolled on our beach, thinking heavenly thoughts. Our house sits on the edge of an ivy-covered, high hill with a vertical drop of ninety-nine wooden steps zigzagging down to a sandy beach below. We have a small beach house at the foot of the stairs. From our place, the beach runs a half-mile south to a little cove and a half-mile north to a point and faces southwest. Maury Island and Vashon Island are directly west, opposite us, across four miles of Puget Sound. Mount Rainier is south of us, sitting high above forested hills, far behind and above our little cove.

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A view of our beach that runs to the point,

jutting out into Puget Sound

My husband and I, originally from the Midwest, moved to Los Angeles in 1994 on a four-year assignment. Settling into life in Rancho Palos Verdes (RPV) on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, we bought a little 1950s cottage house with an ocean view, which we slowly renovated on weekends and evenings. This included routing and finishing stuccowork on the outside and routing and finishing plaster walls on the inside, along with painting. We were younger then and energetic, thriving on fourteen-, eighteen-, and sometimes twenty-two-hour days. At the height of my career as a success trainer, I would frequently return at midnight or one from a speaking engagement in Orange County and also cross paths with my husband at four as he got up to begin his day.

One morning at one, my husband, bleary-eyed from sleep, suggested we rethink our crazy work schedules. The final year that we’d lived in RPV, I stopped my evening speaking engagements. When a career opportunity opened up in Seattle for my husband, we moved to Seattle after our exciting ten-year stay in LA.

In August 2004, my husband announced, as we had been expecting, that his company had won a new contract and we would be moving to Seattle. However, we did not need to move until January 2005. When I heard that, I exclaimed, I am not moving to the Pacific Northwest in the middle of winter! And as I usually did when facing any major life decision, I charged full speed ahead, sold our house in two weeks, and flew up to Seattle by myself to house hunt as my husband was tied up with work between the two locations and was not available.

It was very exciting––a cross between exhilarating and scary. I flew into a city and state I had never visited before, rented a car, drove the coastline, and decided on an area in which we could live that provided easy access to my husband’s office and the airport, because he would be doing some traveling. Did I mention the coastline? Yes, we would be overlooking the water!

I worked until two days before the move, and we rented a long, long RV for the move—one that had a bedroom in the back, kitchenette with foldout dinette table, and bunk above the cab. The cab had two recliner chairs and a large console between them, with an open walkway through to the kitchenette, bathroom, and beyond.

We needed all that space due to the fact that I had spent the previous ten years heavily involved in cat rescue with several other women on the peninsula, doing trap, neuter, and release (TNR) and adoptions of the cats that were tame. Because so many of the cats were feral and unadoptable, we each had our own menagerie of cats that no one would adopt. So, there I was with thirteen cats of varying ages and temperaments to move with us, along with Annie, a rescued American Staffordshire terrier mixed-breed dog; she was so cute: all white with three large black spots.

Annie had a very high prey drive and would kill a cat if the opportunity presented itself. Accordingly, I made the following plans: The cats would be housed in dog kennels of varying sizes, allowing for two to three cats, a litter box, and food dishes per kennel. All the cats, like people, had their favorite partners they preferred to sleep and eat with, so the kennel setup for the cats was fairly easy. Annie would reside in her three-by-six-foot wire dog kennel in the kitchenette area, where I could monitor her closely.

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Annie, our rescued American Staffordshire

terrier mixed-breed dog

We were to leave at nine in the morning and make the fifteen-hour drive over two days, arriving at our new home, where we would joyfully unload and set up the house. Unfortunately, true to form for me, we didn’t begin to load the RV until one o’clock, irritating my husband to no end. We then discovered Annie’s cage would not fit through the very narrow RV side door, so it had to be disassembled and reassembled—after the four individual side pieces, top piece, and bottom piece were loaded separately inside the RV. I could see my husband’s blood pressure rising, and he is a very calm, stoic man.

In our thirty years of homing rescued dogs and cats, this particular kennel was one of the hardest to assemble that we had ever encountered. The metal rods had to be inserted correctly (not backward) through metal loops along the outside edges of the side panels. And these panels had to be stood up vertically, all four sides’ edges resting on each other, before the rods were threaded through the loops. Only then could the top side be attached in the same manner.

Even though we had assembled and disassembled the cage several times, the procedures included sides falling down as the metal rods were to be threaded through loops, so we’d have to start all over again. After several failed attempts (increasing our stress levels because it was making our departure time even later), our tempers flared with both of us making threats, climaxing in me feeling that our marriage was about to be over.

By three, we were completely loaded up, humans and cats. All I had to do was walk Annie up the two steps, through the door, into the RV kitchen, and into her cage. She went up the steps, into the RV, and refused to step into her cage. After several tries and growling expletives (from me, not the dog), I squeezed between the two front seats and into my seat, with Annie sitting on the floor just behind us. My husband looked over his shoulder at Annie and asked, What’s Annie doing here?

I meekly answered, She won’t go into her cage. Two hours of silence followed.

Annie rode like an angel, sitting between our two chairs in the front, never making a false move. We never needed to use her kennel, as the cats were always in their kennels, even as I changed litter and food bowls. It took my husband about two hours into the drive before he broke his icy silence and we could have a semi-civil conversation.

There was one other little glitch. Most of the cats could not be easily handled (and some could not be touched, much less picked up). This was not a problem, because they would stay in their kennels until arriving at their new home, when the kennels would be carried into their wonderfully large, accommodating new cattery room, and they would gingerly walk out.

There were two exceptions: Tawny, a wonderful tan-and-gray tiger stripe that got along with everyone and was a real love, and Tara. Tara was a pipsqueak of a thing, about four and a half pounds, polydactyl (having large thumbs on her front feet), and with an attitude, but we could pick her up. She was a tortoiseshell cat, and one of the most beautifully marked ones we had ever seen. Her coloring was typical—oranges, browns, and black spattered onto her coat, but not dull or muted at all. The patterns of color were eye-catching, with sharp color contrasts of black against bright orange. Tara had her own cat carrier for the trip, so none of the larger cats hogged her food. I thought it would be convenient to put her carrier on the overhead bunk right above the driver’s seat.

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Tara, our little tortoiseshell cat with a

high-octane attitude and voice

Unfortunately, Tara exhibited her voice to us for the first time. Instead of the demure little squeak of a mew that we had heard only occasionally from her, two hours into the trip Tara began to howl at length, on and on and on, nonstop. My husband had just gotten over the silent treatment he was harboring, and Tara did not stop until we arrived at our new home. And so it was, Tara pitting the entire force of her four and a half pounds of physical weight and high-pitched wail of a voice against my husband’s stoic 185 pounds of weight and silence.

Tara continued her soprano screaming the entire trip; my husband’s steely resolve was unbroken and unflinching. As for me, my insides were clenched with each belt of Tara’s voice, my nerves almost shot with anticipation of my husband’s verbal response. I was just waiting for him to say something, but it was Tara, the howler, against my husband, the stoic. And my husband won out. He never said a word about her. However, my nerves were a wreck.

On the first night, we stayed in the RV. Deciding it was best, and safest, to just pull off the highway and stay at a rest stop in Oregon among several huge tractor-trailers, that’s just what we did. It was about nine on a clear, dark night when we drove into a picturesque rest area just off the highway. Taking Annie on leash for her evening walk, in pitch darkness, I walked to the edge of the sidewalk and into the woods, looking straight up amid eighty-foot evergreen trees spiraling high into the sky. Their outstretched treetops revealed a canopy of blue-white sparkling stars against a deep-navy, ink-blue sky. This was my first glimpse of how spectacular the nights would be in the Pacific Northwest.

During our trip, we stopped at one of those family restaurants that are always just off the highway at an easy-access intersection. I would go in and order a club sandwich with fries, chocolate shake, and soda to go, and take it back to the RV, where we’d split the meal, always reinvigorated for the next several hours of our journey. Between stops, when my husband was bound and determined to make time by careening up and down valleys and mountains alongside eighteen-wheelers racing to our destinations, I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by straddling in a wide stance the width of the kitchen area, locking myself into a wobbly, shock-absorbing stance, and silently praying for our safety, as we charged valiantly along our route at seventy miles per hour.

Upon our arrival at our new home, rain poured down for three days straight. Even though our furniture had not arrived during that three-day period, we joyously unloaded the cats into their eight-by-twenty-foot room, inside the lower level, next to the garage and workshop room. It had a full sink with running water and windows that ran the length of the room, complete with white linoleum floors, great for easy cleanup.

My husband and I and Annie slept in the RV, listening blissfully to the rain on the roof. Once the movers arrived, my husband focused