And making stops along the way….
This Gord Downie lyric comes to mind this week as we look for the right place to retire to. It is a strange experience, because we are trying to make a massive decision without all the information we need to hand. At the same time, we are not really deciding at all, at least not in any practical sense. All we are doing is trying to get comfortable with an idea, right?
Let me back up. Once upon a time we lived in a certain place. Due to the need to follow my work opportunities we decided to move across an ocean, very far from the area we came from. We sold our house even. We left feeling completely free from the financial burden of maintaining a home, finding renters, etc. Due to a variety of economic and personal reasons we knew we would never be going back to the exact area where we had once lived, raised 2 kids and had a nice life. That chapter was closed. We were at peace with that decision.
We lived in this faraway place, across an ocean for a time. We rented a nice home, enjoyed a very different kind of life, driving on the other side of the road even. But, as these things go, the job was not turning out as good as it could have been and something better came along. No sooner than we really got settled in the faraway place, it was time to move again. We packed up our things and sailed them back across the ocean, but this time landed in a place known, but not known at the same time.
It is a strange thing to live on a street that is part of a city or regional area, where all the streets are fairly similar. The geography is common, some streets are closer to a park or farther away from a café, but generally these streets seem to belong together. Then you have a cluster of cities that belong to some kind of larger geographical area on a map. What binds these cities together is the close proximity of distance to each other and the common histories of the people who live there. Families and friends are often scattered between and it is fairly easy to get from one city to the next. Because of this relative closeness and shared history, it is easy to know each other, even when you don’t. There are few social or economic barriers preventing people from moving from one of these local places to the other. You know what to expect in the customs and norms.
Then we find the more unusual parts of the world where all these regional areas are lumped together across vast distances of land. These clusters of people, communities and customs often have stark differences, even speaking different languages. The distances are so great that most citizens never journey far from their regional home during their whole lives, let alone touch every corner. Some people are nomadic and wander around for a time when they are young. Usually once they ‘settle down’ they stay put, at least not moving from place to place, year after year.
Once our furniture sailed back across the ocean from the faraway place, we landed on the shores of freshwater, 5 days of driving away from the place where we sold our house on saltwater beaches. These two cities are bound together by common overarching governance but are otherwise quite different. On one hand we understood everything about how the place of 5 days driving distance was supposed to operate, the language was the same, but so many other things were not known to us. The weather and climate are very different, this also drives the nuances of behavioural variety. On one side of the 5 days drive you have vast amounts of rain and on the other side snow.
The job was the reason we chose to live on the shores of freshwater. Once the job is done, due to retirement, we won’t stay living there. There is a pull back to the saltwater shores that we cannot deny. We are compelled by geography, by weather, by climate and by culture. We are drawn by the history, the trees and the variety of beaches and driftwood at every turn. We are looking for a place ‘to happen’ in retirement that is very common to where we have spent most of our adult lives, yet subtly different as well. We are seeking out a local cluster of streets on an island. It takes several hours to travel from the place where we sold our house, involving driving over land and a cruise on a large ferry boat. As each transition of the route passes by, the traveller becomes more entrenched into the life force of the island. You move to island time, similar to a time zone change, but in this case a slowing down from the frenetic city time zone.
We are more than comfortable with the idea of the geographical area we have chosen to live in retirement. And we have lived in many places around the world over the years, for varying lengths of time. We are able to fairly judge what will work for us and what won’t. But how to choose a single street and a specific house? How to envision making this idea into a home and a life? This takes a significant amount of imagination, planning and execution. Making this place happen, is no small feat.
The work is upon us now. We have a long list of houses on streets that we have been looking at for many months. We have a budget, of course. We also have to be careful of not getting depressed by all that we cannot afford. We are lucky by most standards of comparison. We won’t squander the joy of this experience. As the days of searching click by, some homes will be right for us, some won’t be. That is not the main point though. We are really trying to zoom into the clusters of streets that are the places we might want ‘to happen in’ for the beginning of our retirement. Then we can stop looking in all the other places that are not for us. We can narrow our search a little more.
This is a process we are making up as we go. What we know for sure is, that we feel at home here on these salty shores, on this island. The middle of February is the best time to know this. If you can like a place during this part of the winter, you can really love it in the summer. At least that is our theory on the matter.
And the search goes on!
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