RELOCATE? WHERE? AND FINALLY, WHY?
Photo: Garry Armstrong
Aside from looking at the millions of items, large and small in this house and wondering if it is even possible to move them — where would we go? There are things we don’t like about New England, pretty much all of which involve weather.
Photo: Garry Armstrong
Cold weather. Snowy weather.
But I love the people, the rivers, the green of it. I love the old barns and I even love Boston, even though I don’t want to live there anymore.
So relocate? Not happening. Whatever inconveniences come with the winter, there’s really no place I’d rather be — except maybe a small, clean house without steps and a lot fewer trees!
But that’s nit-picking, right?
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Categories: #Photography, Blackstone Valley, Home, Humor, New England
SERENDIPITY - SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
When my father in law died, his wife stayed in their home for about two years, studying her options. She decided on low income housing, right in the town she grew up in. It was for seniors, and very well kept up. There’s a tendency to think of low income housing as shacks somewhere on a back street, but these were really nice, clean, quiet, well maintained. . She said it suited her perfectly, and she spent her last five years there.
It might be something to look into.
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My daughter-in-law and granddaughter live in low income housing and it’s quite nice. We are not eligible for it. We don’t earn enough to pay for regular housing, but we are too rich for the subsidized places. And not by much, either. Like maybe $2000.
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I can’t fathom why people seem to “enjoy” moving around so much. My one move from the parents’ house to the one I live in now was more than enough of the experience for me. I’m perfectly fine if I never have to pack up and leave again….
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Our only problem is that this house needs maintenance and we re no longer able to do it. Neither of us wants to move. Ever. But we may have to, eventually. I sure hope not, though.
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I don’t miss shoveling snow, cold temperatures, and icy winds. But I do miss the serenity and beauty of a freshly fallen snow when sitting inside a warm, cozy home in front of a roaring fire looking out of the living room window. But not enough to relocate back to a place that has cold, snowy, icy winters.
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It is beautiful and I used to love going out in my big boots, camera in mittened hands. It’s hard for me to do that these days. I tend to just fall down and have trouble getting back up!
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There’s no two ways about it – home is home.
Leslie
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And there’s also the small matter of being able to afford to move. We don’t have the money and the amount we would get for this place would be approximately the amount of the mortgage. With nothing left, we’d be homeless … so there’s little point is selling the home we’ve got for something we can’t afford.
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Home is still home, Marilyn.
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I love snow. I remember working in New York City one year and ignoring the warnings. I ended up having to spend the night on a couch in my office all alone and waking up the next morning and walking down an untouched blanket of snow down Fifth Avenue.
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Snow is beautiful, but when you get old, it is also heavy, wet, and slippery. If I had the money to make sure someone else could take care of it, that’s what we’d do. But we don’t. And we are not getting any younger.
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yep, I hear that. This house and land is in an easement, and someone specific will be taking it over when the last of us moves out or is carried/wheeled/dragged away. So that’s not a concern, in that regard. But I hear the rest of it: where does one go, even if you hafta, or know you should, when you flat out don’t want to.
We’ve agreed this is no place for one person to try to maintain, we sort of complement the other that way and right now that works fine. But this is no place for one person, especially in the winter.
Reality bites.
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I know. I try not to think about it. But now that they have removed the ability to go to an old age place, there really IS no place to go. We have NO money. So it’s one of those interesting questions — without money for senior housing, we are stuck. REALLY stuck.
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An abundance of trees isn’t for everyone. Sure, they’re pretty, but raking those leaves in the fall? Now that we’re older, my husband and I are very happy that we managed to find a house with a little space around it, and a tiny “forest” along one side – but for whatever reason, the wind seems to blow the leaves into the neighbors’ yards instead of ours. The neighbors are much younger than we are – let them do the raking.
As for winter, we managed to move from the one suburb that never got much snow to one of the suburbs that tends to get hit in every snowstorm – and we have a really long driveway now. But we’ll deal with it. We have occasionally thought about relocating to another state, but our family is here and aside from the snow, we have no real complaints. We’ve decided that if the snow comes down hard enough and accumulates enough, we’ll just stay in and then clear it when we can. (Maybe our much younger neighbors will take pity on us. Only time will tell.)
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We have plows come and deal with the LONG driveway and Owen bought us a snow vacuum — it’s for cleaning sidewalks so we don’t get trapped in here. But you know, Garry is 75 and I’m 70 and we aren’t getting younger. Our ability to manage this place isn’t getting better. I really don’t know what will become of us, especially with all the money for “senior housing” cut out of the national budget.
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I hear you, Marilyn. I am 65 and my husband is 63. Recently, we discussed (again) fixing up this new house so we can sell it at a profit in a couple of years and then go into some kind of senior housing where we won’t have to do yard maintenance. Assuming there is any affordable senior housing by then. Only time will tell.
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