Let’s see, we’ve been married 46 years and have lived in many places: Iowa, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Minnesota (notice how we keep moving further north - not the brightest bulbs in the candelabra) and finally Iowa (where we come full circle, back to where we started. Lots of reasons for this but mostly because we had aging parents.
When we first married, we lived in Saunderstown, RI. The Navy had deposited Gary in Rhode Island and when he got out of the service he entered URI, the University of Rhode Island. I had moved out to Rhode Island after college, trying to get as far away from home as I could without crossing an ocean. We’ve known each other since elementary school but never dated. We didn’t start that archaic activity until we were both in Rhode Island. Gary got out of the Navy and I graduated from Grad School at the same time and, since we had dated for 3 years, we followed the 60’s trend, rented a house and moved in. Nice little house, between Providence, RI where I worked and URI where Gary was in school.
We took this picture two years ago during a trip through New England, Now it looks like this. Much nicer. A cute little cottage in the woods.
We got married 4 months later, Gary quit school and got a job with Burroughs in Mass, much further north - so we moved north to Pawtucket, RI into the apartment where Gary had lived with some Navy buddies. We’re on the 3rd floor here - with a very small plain window in front,
Now the house looks like this. Again, much better.
Gary’s next job was with a company in Lawrence, MA, further north and we moved to Andover, MA, close to his job. Meanwhile I was hired as a History teacher in Plaistow, NH, a few miles north. We bought this duplex and were ecstatic that there were already tenants who could help defray the costs.
Oops, be careful of what you wish for - they were awful: 5 kids, two adults and a St. Bernard who didn’t give two cents for the house and were slowly destroying it. But, we got rid of them - we sold the house. (Now, we can speculate why the previous owner sold to us)
Time to build our own home in New Hampshire. They don’t call it the ‘Granite State’ for nothing - it took all day to blast a hole in the rock ledge here to make enough space for our foundation. But it was ours, all ours and we loved living in the woods on a 1 acre lot. Hey, see all that wood piled neatly off to the left? It was delivered in 16’ long logs. We chopped it up, piled it up and used it all winter to heat out house.
No mowing or raking since we covered the ground with mulch but we replaced mowing with this long driveway and, in New Hampshire winters, it took a lot of shoveling and snow blowing. We put in those front steps with a rented cement mixer and lots of shoveling. Not only that we put the stain on the house and painted every inch in the interior. It took forever.
It still looks the same except for the water element in front. And, the greenery that we had planted had grown.
Then, the company that Gary had worked for fell on hard times (they made keyboards for computers and were clobbered by the advent of laptops) and we decided to move back to the Midwest. Our parents were getting older and might need us. Good move. But - we didn’t want to live in Fort Dodge, IA where they were so we moved to the hip, cosmopolitan town of Minneapolis. Into an apartment. Gotta have jobs so we decided to open our own business, a video store franchise called Mr. Movies in one of the northern suburbs, Brooklyn Park. Oops, we live too far away now and need to move - into an apartment up there.
But, the taxes on the capital gains that we had on our home in New Hampshire were coming due so we bought a home in another northern suburb, Maple Grove. And, why not buy the Maple Grove Mr. Movies store? Oh, yeah, why not? We don’t have a picture of the house after we painted it a much lighter color. We didn’t take many pictures back then. We were too busy shoveling the snow.
About 7 years later, we sold the Brooklyn Park store which barely paid for itself and the Maple Grove store, which had done quite well until Hollywood Video, Blockbuster and another smaller chain moved within 3 blocks of us. We sold everything back to the franchise owner who put it all into another store and we moved south to Des Moines, Iowa, again to be closer to our parents. My father had died, my mother had developed Alzheimers and soon Gary’s mother would develop pancreatic cancer. We were so glad that we had continually moved closer to them. Staying in New England would have been impossible.
First we rented a home in Des Moines. It was fall and the trees kept dropping. I don’t think that anyone had ever taken care of this yard and those bushes were in dire need of a pruning. We were going to let it all sit since we were just renting this place but we couldn’t. We got our rakes out of the garage where they were all bundled with the other yard tools for our move and began to fill the yard waste bags. And fill them. And fill them. 21 bags later, we put the rakes back into the bundle, went inside and had a hot chocolate. We lived here until spring when the ‘gotta have a house’ bug hit us and we began looking.
One Sunday, we saw a For Sale sign on the street and drove into this cul de sac to the tan house at the end. No one was home, there was no open house but the neighbor told us to go into the back yard. OK. Oh, wow. All trees and no homes in back of us. And, we bought it.
We lived here for several years until we decided that we wanted to travel when we retired - without the responsibility of mowing, raking, shoveling. All those fun household chores. Then we moved to a town home on another cul de sac. We’re always at a dead end. No comments, please.
Meanwhile Gary’s mother and my mother had died and Gary’s father, pretty hale and hearty, was our only parent left. By this time we had bought an RV and were snow-birding. We continued to head back to Iowa for the summer so that we could help him with whatever he needed done. But, we were already thinking of going full-time in the RV. We loved the travel that came with the RV and always wanted to continue traveling in May rather than head back to Iowa. When he died in 2013, we not only cleaned out and sold his house but, being in practice, we turned to ours, cleaned it out and sold it too.
And, that’s it. Here we are in our home. We love the lifestyle and hope to continue for a while more. But, we know that in the end we need an ‘exit’ plan for when we can no longer do this. We keep looking for the ‘perfect’ place but haven’t found it yet so continue to look.
And, this year we bought our ‘exit plan.’
Apartments, a duplex, a town home, a rental home, a big home, a small home, a home we built, an RV and now a park model. We’ve tried them all.
And that’s the story of our living arrangements in 1287 words. When are we going to settle down?
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