On the one hand, this has been a typical week for 2025 in that the news has thrown even more of my life upside down.
On the other hand, it has been atypical. I haven’t been able to concentrate on the news or what can be done about the events roiling our country and our world for reasons that have nothing to do with the news in the wider world but that has everything to do with my personal world.
I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything other than the fact that we are moving.
I have even found myself distracted back to my obsession with traditional old time folk music and this song, ”It’s Moving Day,” from an obscure group, The Holy Modal Rounders, who soon merged into an almost equally obscure group, The Fugs.
https://youtu.be/9swGKr9Kg1w?si=-X4K6TPwDTsvlqw8
As someone who has almost exclusively listened to classical music since my last move in 1995, this was a bit jarring to my ears. If you are up for it, you can find several versions of the original by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers from 1930 on line. When I checked it out, I learned that Poole died at age 39 the following year of alcohol poisoning, almost certainly from his own moonshine.
I was reminded, too, of an amazing book from the time of that last move, Material World, in which sixteen famous photographers spent a week living with statistically average citizens in thirty countries around the world. At the end of their visit, they had the families move all of their belongings onto the front yard and then took a picture which the National Geographic published as a book with prose snippets written by the soon-to-be famous author of 1491 and 1493, Charles Mann. We couldn’t have done that without the help of the movers who arrive on Thursday—even after we donated over 90% of our 5,000 books to our local library, including our copy of Material World.
Our Final Move?
On one level, it’s not a huge move. Less than a mile. The same zip code. We’ll be able to go to the same farmer’s market and Whole Foods. The same coffee house to hang out with Liz Hume or meet work colleagues. We’ll be even closer to both the Metro and our grandkids, both of which were already within easy walking distance.
We made the move, frankly, because we are getting old. I’m 77, and Gretchen just turned 80. In the last few years, we watched my mother’s health deteriorate in the years before she died while living in a three story home that she didn’t have the money to move out of. Realizing that we did not want to put our family through the hassle of watching us do the same thing, we decided to move on our own terms.
So, once we realized that the time would soon come when shoveling even the limited amount of snow DC gets or gardening or climbing the stairs to the laundry would become a burden. Then, we realized that we really didn’t need the second floor of our house other than for laundry.
So, we decided to look at our options. Well, Gretchen decided that we should look a t our options and had to drag me kicking and screaming into the real estate world and making what we assumed would be our final move. For all my interest in new ideas, I’m actually a creature of habit and inertia when it comes to everyday life.
We started by looking at a senior residential facility that also had an assisted living unit—on the assumption that we would only have to move one time. We toured the one in our neighborhood and realized that, while we could easily, live in such a place, it wasn’t for us—at least not yet.
So, because Falls Church is going through a burst of urban renewal, we checked out some new apartment complexes, and I realized that we could easily downsize into a modern two bedroom unit. Once we saw a two bedroom unit that we could easily live in, I got over my intertia and have been saying “I’m ready to move” almost hourly ever since.
We had planned on renting until Gretchen’s daughter and her husband convinced us that it would make more sense to buy. So, in January, we looked at condo units in the same new comprehensive development where we had been planning to rent. We put a deposit on a large two bedroom unit and have been waiting for the formal opening of The Oak which happened yesterday. We close on our unit Wednesday. Movers will pack us up Thursday; We move in on Friday.
We put our house on the market in early May. Because we are in a great school district and in walking distance of the Metro, we knew that the house wouldn’t be on the market long. Although our house is perfectly livable, we knew that a builder would immediately buy it for an obscene amount of money so that they could tear it down and put up a new house that would sell for at least $2.5 million. Our realtor got offers within minutes; it sold within hours for almost ten times what Gretchen paid for it forty years ago.
A New Life at the Oak
We are doubly lucky in our move.
Unlike my mother, we have the financial flexibility to do what we want. We already owned our house free and clear which meant that we could the same with our condo, earn enough from pensions and social security to live on, and have more money than we ever dreamed of having in assets. It would take an all but unpredictable disaster for us to end up running out of money the way my mother almost did before she died at 102.
We are also lucky because we are moving on our terms into a place where we can continue to age comfortably until one or both of us needs assisted living. Or worse.
The Oak will also be an intriguing place to live. Given the price and location, its roughly 120 units will attract economically comfortable people like us. Given the fact that owners can only have one car and given Falls Church’s ultra-liberal reputation, we assume that many of our new neighbors will share at least some of our values interests. Once the sales team working for the developers realized what we do for a living, they asked if we would help do things like organize some programming (for example, have Falls Church native Pete Davis come in to discuss his film about Robert Putnam, Join or Die) or set up a lending library in the community center.
Although we have lived in our neighborhood for 40 years (in Gretchen’s case; only 35 in mine), we barely know our neighbors. While I lost any desire to live in anything resembling an intentional community when I was part of the counter culture world in Maine fifty years ago, I am hoping that we will get to know more of the people we will be sharing the building with. It does have a lounger (for the talks and library), a gym, and a large outdoor area with picnic tables, barbecue grills, and a television.
We will get a sense for what could be done along those lines on Wednesday when the developer throws a gala welcoming reception for the first round of owners. The event itself has been postponed twice because of rain, but all the signs are that we will be able to in the outdoor common space meeting our neighbors and sampling food from the restaurants that have already opened in the larger development which will eventually form a new kind of urban community.
Back to Real Life
Of course, given the news in the broader world, my obsession of the last ten days has been a relief.
Next week, I’ll return to work and my next challenge—creating a market that doesn’t exist for my book which should hit the virtual bookstores by September.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.
