Five Months Left On The Retirement Countdown Chain

“I’m sending you a house.”

And with a few touches on the screen of my iPad I send another real estate listing to Gerry’s email. It’s Saturday morning and we’re lazing in bed later than usual with a second cup of coffee and our iPads reading the news and catching up on favorite blogs.

In recent months I’ve spent less time with Huff Post, Feedly and Flipboard and a lot more time on the Realtor.ca app looking at houses. To say that I’ve been feeling stressed at the prospect of selling our current home without having a clear vision of where we are moving to is an understatement.

I’m the kind of person who likes to make a plan and start moving in that direction; the ambiguity of not having a clear destination in front of me makes me uneasy. I want a vision in my mind of my new home. I want to be able to lay in bed at night and imagine myself inhabiting this new home.

I’ve become daily visitor on the Realtor.ca app. I’ve taken more than my share of virtual tours of homes, memorized slideshows, gotten familiar with neighborhoods, and sent email after email to my husband to get his input on certain houses that I see as possibilities. This summer we traveled back to Canada a few times to visit the kids and grands armed with real estate listings and appointments with realtors. We viewed house after house, considered pros and cons, and began talking in pre-retirement-house-hunting shorthand that only we understood and we came up with creative names for houses under consideration.

“I’m leaning toward the artist’s house.”

“We’d have to paint spearfish.”

“I like the garden at the one with the porches.”

“Muirfield is just too small.”

“The one with the pantry is great!”

We’ve done a lot of talking about where we want to move to over the summer. A lot. We considered the lifestyle we want in retirement, thought about proximity to family and friends, pondered the weather, prayed for direction, narrowed our focus, and changed our plans.

We’ve decided that we want to go home. Really home. Back home to the place where we’ve spent the better part of our lives.

Some of our kids are over the moon with our decision to go home; others are disappointed we didn’t stick with the original plan but supportive and understanding of our change in plans; many friends are excited about us coming home soon. All in all it just feels right.

There’s still the matter of selling our current home and moving though. How much easier it would be if we were retiring and staying where we are! There’s no denying that there’s a level of change involved in our retirement that is greater than many retirees face at their time of transition and, if you’re the kind of person I am, this level of looming change and accompanying uncertainty can result in more than a few restless nights.

Last night as we turned out the lights Gerry leaned over, kissed me goodnight, and put his hand on my shoulder.

“It will all turn out,” he said gently.

It will, of course it will. We’re going home and I can’t wait.