I did not choose retirement the way Michael did. He walked out of a forty year career at the top of it, celebrated by family, friends and the people he had worked alongside over the decades. I closed my wedding floral design business because we moved, and then COVID ended what I had spent years building. By the time weddings came back, I had been away from One Precious Pearl long enough to know I could not return.

The paths that brought us into retirement look nothing alike. They never really have, not even after we married in 2006.

Michael did not wander into his career. He graduated from Purdue with an undergrad degree in Mechanical Engineering Technology. Cummins recruited him before he finished at Purdue. He started as a Quality Engineer in their fuel systems business and was leading other engineers within three years. Eventually he joined the team implementing the Cummins Production System across global operations. The MBA from Indiana University’s Kelly School of Business came six years in, long enough to confirm what he already knew. The work was less about moving up than about making things work better.

That path led him to plant manager, then manufacturing leadership at Honeywell, then Senior Vice President of Operations for Aerospace at Woodward. Forty years of decisions that all pointed in the same direction. He is one of the few who finished his working years doing exactly what he set out to do. He will tell you the people he worked with during those years mattered as much as anything he built.

I skipped college and went to design school instead, which felt right at the time and still does. A marriage, a family, and active farming followed. When a nationwide farm crisis ended that chapter, I packed up two young children and a newborn every day, dropped them off at daycare, and went back to business school. What came next was less a career plan and more a series of doors that opened one after another. Legal work led to agricultural lending, then to financial advising with a nationally known firm, then to private practice.

Those years were full, but ultimately exhausting. The left side of my brain had done enough. I sold my financial advising practice in 2014, enrolled in design school for a second time, completed 500 credit hours, and became a certified professional floral designer. One Precious Pearl Floral Design launched in Minneapolis that year. Everything I had learned in the previous twenty years in business, finance, and law, I brought into building this next venture.

Focusing only on weddings, I met truly wonderful couples and their families. These were busy, physically demanding, creatively expressive years. Michael was my late night crew, cleaning up after me in the studio, driving with me all over the Twin Cities to set up and tear down the weddings. I loved every bit of it.

Our life in Minneapolis was good. Michael moved up at Honeywell and One Precious Pearl was a successful startup. Our children and grandchildren lived nearby. Then came an offer from Woodward Inc. in northern Illinois that could not be ignored. And it wasn’t.

September 2019, Michael accepted the offer. November brought the harder work of canceling prospective weddings, pulling out of 2020 wedding shows, selling my flower cooler and inventory, filling packing boxes, and trying to accept moving 400 miles from our family. We both knew we were making the right decision. As difficult as it was, I never doubted the providence in it. My retirement arrived drowned in tears instead of a full glass of champagne.

What I could not have known at the time was that COVID was months away. The move that cost me my business likely saved me from something far worse. Advertising contracts and booked wedding shows would have left me carrying debt I could not have recovered from. The wedding industry shut down for years. The closing I grieved was actually the blessing I did not see coming.

Six years later, confident it was time for Michael to retire as well, we celebrated on October 3rd, 2025, with colleagues as our children traveled in from the north. That Saturday, friends and family gathered on a beautiful Midwest fall evening. Lights twinkling in the trees, tea lights and flowers on the tables in the yard, fire pits glowing, soft music floating through the air, glasses raised, toasts offered. A perfect celebration.