OUR GOLDEN YEARS
Our Retirement Home
Downsizing for retirement
My wife and I moved to a retirement community in 2005. My main reason for wanting to move was because I was afraid that my wife would fall while running down to my basement office or from our second floor bedroom.
In this community, you buy your home — a “manufactured home” delivered in two pieces and installed on a slab with a low crawlspace — and rent your lot. The current lot rent is $843 monthly and is raised yearly based on a government inflation index.
There are approximately 1200 homes in this community. We have a tennis court, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and a large clubhouse with a gym, 2 pool (billards) rooms, a large community room for dances and meetings, a library, and several activity rooms for clubs and small parties. Our rent covers access to the clubhouse, use of the pools and gym, but not dances and other special events. Those paid events are always inexpensive.
We used to go to the gym and the dances regularly, but since COVID, we get our exercise at home.
Once a year we have a yard sale in the clubhouse and donate all proceeds to scholarships for the local high school. We were very active helpers at this sale for several years, but have not been able recently.
Our home is in a quiet cul-de-sac. We have one neighbor to the left and are surrounded by trees behind and to the right. It is very quiet except when the lawnmowers show up to do the whole neighborhood. Our rent includes lawn mowing, bush trimming, snow plowing, and snow shoveling.
Today was grocery shopping day. This is one of the three stores I usually stop at.
I pass some beautiful old homes in Middleboro on my way between stores. Friends of ours owned the big brown house and the converted stable behind but sold it recently.
Those reading from outside of the U.S. might find my grocery receipts interesting. A hundred dollars a week is fairly typical for the two of us.
And here is dinner ready to eat.
We have quiet lives now. My wife is not well, so we have few visitors and seldom go out except for medical appointments, to shop or visit our daughter who still lives in the nearby town she grew up in. Our other daughter is hundreds of miles away — she can’t travel now because she’s battling a serious cancer, so we have not seen her for years. We do talk on Facetime at least once a week, which is almost as good.
I spend most of my days taking care of my wife, doing chores around the house, cleaning, exercising, and writing here at Medium. We go to bed early and get up early.
Our Golden Years are quiet years.