Friends, November 3, 2017
Big family news, and a double invite:
We are moving from Waterbury to a Continuum of Care retirement community in Santa Barbara, Calif, .
It was a big decision, with a lot of ambivalence. We’ve lived in Waterbury over 60 years, raised our three children here, Peter has practiced law here, held public office, taught; Frances has taught many grades in public school and done volunteer work here since retiring. We have dear friends here, and like our community. But we’re pushing 90, have multiple stairs in our house on Greenwood Avenue, and although we have help and assistance from many friends, even the chores of everyday life are becoming a burden.
Our son Harold, who lives in Santa Barbara and teaches at UCSB, has found a very attractive retirement community called Vista del Monte in Santa Barbara, and we have applied for a two-bedroom unit there, move-in hopefully mid-November. It will be for an Independent Living unit, and our medical conditions need to be approved as adequate for what it offers that we want. We are looking forward to it with both pleasure and pain, pleasure in the expectation that it will make life a lot easier for us day-to-day in beautiful surroundings, pain at leaving behind friends and comrades to whom we’ve become very close and whose friendships we treasure highly. But all life involves change, and aging is a part of life; better to acknowledge and adapt to it than to fight it in an inevitably losing battle. .
Harold has been wonderful in helping with the pending arrangement in California, and we hope to see his two children more often. Irene is with us right now helping with this end of the moving, quite a task after so many years in a relatively large house and multiple interests. Tabitha has been a solid support. Andrew in Pennsylvania and some of his four children have been visiting with us to help out, as has Fran’s sister Barbara, and all have happily promised to come visit us there regularly.
Vista del Monte, between the mountains and the sea, is a community of some 150 units, with a wide range of facilities and activities We will have a living room, two bedrooms, a basic kitchen, two meals a day at a central dining room. We think it will be ideal for visitors. We really don’t know quite what to expect in what will be essentially a completely new life for us, but we hope that close continuing contact even if at a distance with family and friends here will make it at least endurable, and even a pleasant way to keep going as far as our abilities will let us. Even with limitations: less travel, no doubt, but forms of communication and contact are multifarious today, and we hope to make full use of them with you all.
And we hope you will reciprocate as well!
***
We’ll be here another two weeks. We are planning an Adopt-a-Plant Open House Sunday Nov 12 -noon -, with refreshments and the hope that most of our house plants will find a new home with some of you in congenial surroundings. And we hope you may find some of the various items and tchotchkies we have accumulated over the years good souvenirs to remember us by. Or you maybe could use some other items we will be leaving behind as too awkward to move or as further unneeded. So come and see, visit, and say au revoir.
And after we arrive at our new digs: Vista del Monte contacts below, we’ll send you details on how we find our new life and what we can offer our old friends if they have a chance to come and see for themselves what the other coast is like.
With regrets but anticipation,
New address: Vista del Monte, 3775 Modoc Road, #235, Santa Barbara, California, 93105
pm35@columbia.edu, francesmarcuse@yahoo.com. Till then, Waterbury 203 753 1140
Peter Marcuse's Blog 