Today’s post is pretty darn close to the Creative Every Day theme of Home. Coming at the end of February, this is the kicker.
We made an impulse purchase yesterday – we opened escrow on a house! We seem to buy our houses with less than thought we give to spending $9.99 on a new can opener. It’s not quite as alarming as it sounds, actually. For anyone who’s been following my blog, you know that I’ve been dealing with aging parents. Mom is 86 with Alzheimers and is starting to forget who people are; Dad is 91 and is just now repeating himself, forgetting things, sleeping most of the day, and Sunday told me he thinks his mind is declining.
That’s all pretty normal. The problem is created by Mom and Dad giving no thought to their declining years other than a refusal to leave their home or let anyone in their home to assist. Which puts the burden on us kids. And “us kids” – well, we may be in our 50s and 60s, but we are still helping out our own kids with grandchildren. The world is getting smaller and we are gravitating back to the days when extended families lived together or in a compound and assisted each other. Only problem is, we don’t live near each other and we’re getting squeezed. Even living in the same city is not near enough. I wrote an essay about that, Stuck in the Middle, mainly to get my thoughts square I guess.
So my husband and I concluded that we need to take whatever steps we can to ease the burden on our children NOW, when we are 63 and healthy and vital. Because if we wait until we need to take steps, we won’t be able to. We decided to sell our house – our beautiful house on the lake. That was not an easy decision. We love this house, we’ve put so much into it, and it’s been perfect for the grandkids and for entertaining. But we thought we should have a one-story house with less maintenance, less yard, but most importantly, with a room and bath separate from the main house so that when we get like my parents are, someone can be hired to live in with us and take the burden off the kids. And moving, while daunting and scary, can only get harder as the years pass.
We were going to wait a year and then start looking. Just the other day I asked Mark if he’d given any thought to neighborhoods and suggested that we might want to think about areas we’d like. Of course, it would be within a small radius of where we are now since two daughters live close by. I said I’d always been curious about the San Trope development.
Which brings me to last Saturday. I went out to take photos of orchards in bloom, took my usual route home which passed San Trope, saw an open house sign and on the spur of the moment turned in. The street was Via Lugano. Not only was Italy our favorite country, I visited William, a former student, three years running while he was in boarding school in Lugano, Switzerland. It must be an omen.
I got to the house.
See the brown door? That’s the front door. This is the door to the left of the brown door:
It leads into a room and bathroom separate from the house! I couldn’t believe it. Some good karma was going on here.
Walking in the front door, there was a large area for a living room.
And a dining area with a built-in breakfront. But take a look at that door you can barely see on the right. It leads into a room with fantastic north light. Studio, anyone? I was getting goosebumps.
Nice big open kitchen with a giant island – something I’ve always wanted. And the drawers have pull-outs so you don’t have to squat and search through the shelves for a bowl. Knees work a little less well each year, so this is a wonderful feature.
A nice family room with fireplace (because we really need that in Bakersfield) and built-in entertainment center, which we’ll probably use to display sculpture.
Fantastic master bath – look at that tub! Bathtubs are very important to me, and we can put in bars and a little staircase when I need it. Like small dogs have to climb up on beds.
Now I was really flipping. This closet is as big as a room, and the house is 2,800 square feet.
Next is the best part. I was afraid we’d have to move into a smaller house in a crowded area. But this house is on a golf course.
We may get hit by an errant golf ball, but we’ll never feel hemmed in.
The yard isn’t too bad. Not much maintenance, and we’ll gradually replace the shrubs with cacti. And we’ll plant a row of queen palms in front of the fence – it might block a golf ball here and there.
The front has a nice parking area, and when the trees have leaves it’ll be like a park. And our end of the street ends with a canal, so no development there.
I drove home and said, “Mark, I’ve found our house.” He came back with me, we went back on Sunday and made an offer, and by the close of Monday we were in escrow. It’s a short sale but everything has been approved. It all just seemed like fate.
Operation Old Age has begun. Packing and moving will probably hasten the old age – Mark can hardly face it, but it would only have gotten worse. And of course there is the matter of selling our current house. Naturally, the next couple of months are the busiest of the year for me without selling, packing and moving. We truly can’t afford to own three houses! (The cabin in Alta Sierra is house-size.)
It makes us sound rich, which we are not. In fact, I hope we have enough to get us through old age. But compared to most of the world, we are wealthy. We’re aware of that and quite grateful. We’re wealthy in family, in possessions and health, in love and friendship, in self-fulfillment. And we have the self-awareness to begin planning for the future as much as possible. Operation Plan Ahead, or Operation Old Age, is underway.
