Creeping Toward Assisted Living

A Few Observations about Aging and Our New Community

Last month, I was mostly living out of my suitcase, in transition, moving from Southern California to North Carolina. Now, we are settling in. We are still unpacking boxes and moving things around, but we live here now, we make meals from food bought here in local stores, and we think about the weather here.

I would like to say a few things about our new home by way of comparison. A friend, Denise J. Hughes, has recently written about the differences she has seen between California and North Carolina here in her Substack. Please check it out. I appreciated her observations and would like to add a few items that most immediately caught my attention.

To begin, there are differences between living in the forests of Raleigh—yes, forests, even in an urban setting—and the desert of the Inland Empire in Southern California. The trees here are allowed to grow and tower and crowd in. They are not trimmed and cut back regularly as they are where we used to live. Also, the heat is wet. My glasses fog up when I leave the air conditioning of my car.

We live roughly three and a half hours from Nags Head and Kitty Hawk on the coast, and roughly five hours from Ashville going west. The unbroken forest here that seems to swallow the curving freeways makes it a bit hard to learn directions to places, or even which direction we are going in. The forest also leaves me musing about things like the Lost Colony of Roanoke, early American colonization, and enslavement. They remind me of many of Flannery O’Connor’s stories, where the trees are always there in the background, crowding up to farms and small towns. O’Connor was, of course, writing stories about people living in Georgia.

Certain roads, running in and out of trees and woods, also remind me of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I grew up. Michigan is also known for its forests and woods.

Recently I saw posts on YouTube by a group claiming to have solved the mystery of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. I doubted this very much. I didn’t click on it.

There are also a few differences in terms we usually associate with identity. In California, we lived in an apartment complex where we were among the oldest residents. We were rarely of interest to the young families and professionals running and harried, shepherding kids from apartments to cars.

Now, we live in a 62+ community. We are on the younger side. People here do stop to introduce themselves and talk about where they have been and where their grown children are. Weeks can then pass before we cross paths again, but there are enough people over seventy around, so we will speak to someone just about every day. A few residents here are still working but close to retirement, and a few have been retired for over a decade but are still not consigned to assisted living.

And this is not assisted living. We have a walk-in shower and wide hallway access, which helps with the walker my wife has to use. But each apartment is an apartment, with kitchens. We plan our own meals every day. And we come and go as we please. There are no nurses on site.

But I guess this could be the next step toward that. There is a planned community events calendar we receive every month that includes events like Bingo, Game Night, Thirsty Thursday, Saturday Continental Breakfast, Exercise Class, and so forth. The activities are planned to encourage meeting and community. When someone has not shown up for an event in a while, people notice this and ask about them.

This is a good place to be for someone no longer working. It offers one partial solution to the problem of deepening isolation among the elderly.

But all the same, my own personal resistance to the idea that I am creeping toward assisted living has me feeling compelled to walk every morning, even in the heat.

The beauty of this place is also enhanced by the diversity of people here. The suburb we are in is deeply integrated, and we are grateful to be part of this community.

And I’ve mostly been able to write—just about every day. I’m finishing the last parts of the memoir and the poem collection. I also wrote two poems, both that will fit into “Coming Shores,” the last section of the poetry book I am now calling Recursions and other Grief Poems. And I continue my commitment to write a bad poem just about every day.

For this move, I want to say that it has been encouraging to have as a constant this ability to continue to correspond with friends. When we moved from Minneapolis/St. Paul to California in 2001, we only had email to keep up with correspondence. Now, the varieties of social media available seem to make continued correspondence possible.

I’m grateful that you continue to read these musings. I hope that you are doing well this summer and accomplishing all that the time allows.

Here’s a picture of the study I’ve been able to set up. I’m getting a lot of work done here. Also, the picture of the rocks is a scene I walk by every morning. Finally, I’ve put up a poem about our cats during the moving process. This poem was accepted last night by the North Carolina Bards group. I’m feeling accepted already. Though our daughter has taken them to her place, and we do miss them, they were as much a part of this whole move as we were.

I’ve Watched my Cats

I knew what to expect this time,

our second move with them, so

I wasn’t surprised the way

they nosed up to the newly

exposed carpet with ridges

dug by dressers, chairs, coffee

tables removed, the two cats

like bison or deer sneaking

up to a new found pond, the

glance back at me, then the

bundled clothes and piles of

junk to be thrown away they

try to hide behind, their eyes

wary, staring at us as though

asking, was all our trust mis-

placed? Were we wrong? Are

you sure what we’re doing? As

they watch the boxes they

used for refuge when strangers

visited are taken out to the

car for Goodwill. With the

silence of their kind, they

find the food bowls filled

at the regular time and place,

then settle into exploring

the now quickly vanishing

terrain of things, turn from

clothes coming off coat

hangers and into bags

and that way that they

have to sit in empty corners,

paws curled under, awaiting

the loss of habitat to stop,

not knowing they also are

part of the future, taken next.