VERO BEACH — The focus of Dawn Orre’s life changed in the blink of an eye last November. She was tending her shop, Tropic Art and Frame, in downtown Vero when her 89-year-old father and 84-year-old mother, on their way to the eye doctor, were hit by an 88-year-old driver turning left in front of them.
Their car flipped into a ditch. Paramedics raced over in only minutes to find her dad face down in water.
Miraculously, he didn’t lose consciousness.
He seemed fine until two days later, when he suffered a heart attack and died. His wife, on life support with 11 fractures, died a month later.
In the aftermath, Dawn was left to care for her mentally challenged sister, Diane, 63. After a lifetime of living with her parents, Diane has moved in with Dawn and Lee Orre.
“She’s such a sweetie-pie,” says Dawn of her sister. “I promised my parents a long time ago that I would not even entertain the idea of putting her in assisted living. I would always take care of her.”
Never mind that Dawn too often needs help; she gets it from her husband Lee.
Diagnosed at 40 with a degenerative disease of the retina, she is already legally blind, and what eyesight remains is deteriorating.
For the past six months, as the grief ebbed, Diane, whose verbal skills are very limited, has taken to gesturing to the sky when she hears mention of her parents.
Lee makes dinner for the three of them when Dawn comes home from the shop, and they watch a show together on a wide-screen TV, big enough for Dawn to see.
“If we go to a restaurant, we have story hour,” says Dawn, laughing. She means that Lee has to read the entire menu out loud.
“And when I’m done, she’ll say, ‘What was that again?’ And then order the baked salmon,” jokes Lee, to Dawn’s delight.
Then, he ribs her that he can bring home new fishing equipment and Dawn doesn’t even know it’s there.
One morning last week as Dawn awoke to get ready for work, she realized in an instant that the blooming blur at the center of her field of vision had grown to the point where her compounded responsibilities were overwhelming.
“That’s it,” she told Lee. “I’m done with the shop.”
Simple as that, and with a smile on her face, Dawn decided to sell Tropic Art and Frame, her gallery and frame shop that was a pioneer in downtown Vero’s arts district, and a favorite gathering place on the neighborhood’s monthly gallery strolls.
For all the thousands of images she has framed for clients, she has never made as bleak a picture more beautiful than the way she envisions retirement.
That life includes her two children and her two grandchildren, and of course, now it includes Diane.
Profoundly affected since age 2 from a severe case of German measles, she needs constant care. At the same time, she is tender, and full of love.
When the Orres scattered their parents’ ashes at sea, Diane waved.
“Bye, momma. Bye, poppa,” she says.
“Poor little thing,” says Dawn, who asked her son to take a picture. “She is just a joy.”
As for Dawn, she has discreetly kept her worsening eyesight from her customers, shielding the oversized font on her computer screen from view and calling on her husband to check over each framed print or painting.
“She couldn’t see the specks under the glass, and that’s the first thing customers look for,” he says.
Dawn suffers from Stargardt disease, the most common inherited form of macular degeneration, typically diagnosed in childhood. In her case, it wasn’t diagnosed until she went in for reading glasses about the time she turned 40.
“The doctor said, ‘I see something behind your eye,’ ” she recalls. He sent her to Miami’s Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, where the condition was diagnosed.
Stargardt affects the photoreceptor cells in the center of the retina, so that the center point in the patient’s field of vision becomes increasingly blurred. Ultimately vision goes from 20/20 to 20/200 or 20/400.
The diagnosis, in 1989, came when she and Lee were at last getting together.
He had met her eight years earlier, riding his racing bike along Singer Island. Dawn worked in a restaurant tending bar. Before that, she was in sales with a food purveyor, traveling up and down the coast selling to convenience stores.
“I loved the interaction with people,” she says.
Lee fell in love with Dawn, whose coy smile is often set off with a flip of her perky haircut.
”I was fascinated by her.”
“And I was playing hard to get,” says Dawn. “But he was persistent.”
When Dawn left a relationship, and then her job, nearly a decade later, Lee made his move.
He invited her to tour the U.S. photographing car races and street rod shows, his passion and profession after a long career as an insurance adjuster.
“Two people travelled with us. We developed all the film on site. It was a fabulous business. We would travel with a mobile photo lab and two motor homes, a canoe, a motorcycle and a Jeep,” he recalls. “Every week, we were somewhere new, and we only worked on weekends.”
It was hugely entertaining, Dawn says, to visit a new town each week.
Meanwhile, she learned to photograph as well – her first sale was to Paul Newman.
She also learned to frame, and for a time, owned a frame shop on U.S. 1 in Lake Park.
But when her son, David Saville, started a family in Vero Beach, she wanted to be closer to her grandchildren.
In 2003, she listed her business, sold it three days later, then listed their condo, and sold it to the first person they showed it to.
Along with Dawn’s parents and sister, they moved to Vero Beach. Dawn rented a space on 12th Street and Old Dixie, and Lee parked his 1949 pale blue Jeepster in front.
In 2009, they relocated the business into the heart of the emerging arts district, in a strip of shops and restaurants directly across from Tiger Lily Gallery and Studios and Gallery 14.
Right away, the couple’s outgoing personality drew a devoted following.
The shop felt more like a living room cocktail party, as the Orres served wine and hors d’oeuvres on First Friday Gallery Strolls.
Even when the shop sells or closes, Dawn, who is 65, intends to participate in the arts scene, as well as volunteer at Sun-up Center, where her sister spends part of her time.
The travelling hasn’t stopped yet though. They are planning a trip to Steamboat Springs with Diane, who recently began to flap her arms at her job at Goodwill, confounding the staff until Dawn explained their travel plans.
Next year, they are planning to go to Nova Scotia.
“At 65, you’re supposed to retire,” she says. “We’ve had a good life. What can I say?”
“We’ve had so much damn fun, we’ve got no regrets,” adds Lee.