When I last wrote—far too long ago—we had decided to put our house on Lake Martin up for sale. Like many people our age, we had recognized the need to simplify our lives: fewer possessions, less space, less maintenance and more time.
As with so many other people, there was a gap in recognizing the need and doing something about it. And there was a gap between deciding to do something about it and actually getting something done.
People came and looked at the house. Some of them liked it. But none of them fell in love with it. Our desire to downsize didn't have a hard deadline, and when the listing expired, we took the house off the market. We went through the motions of ridding ourselves of some of our excess possessions, but the fact is, as long as you have a place to put things, you tend to hang onto them.
This year, as winter faded into spring, we offered the house for sale again. And this time, someone fell in love with it.
Suddenly, downsizing was no longer a vague goal but a looming reality.
So, barring the unexpected, in a matter of weeks, this Letter From the Lake should more appropriately be called a Letter From the Village.
Our lives have been a series of adventures, and this latest chapter has had some unexpected twists of its own. After all, we had lived in on Lake Martin longer than we had lived anyplace since we got married, and we had no urgent call to get away. Each morning we watched the sun light up the ridge and then the houses along the shore across the slough, and in the evening we lingered at the table as the twilight slipped into darkness, and every single day we knew how fortunate we were to be there. We had never been to Dadeville before we bought our little piece of paradise, and finding a community where we put down solid roots was lagniappe.
Even as we were putting the house on the market, we weren't thinking about moving away from the community where we had put down so many roots. With deliberation we had not shopped for a new home before ours was sold; there was no point in falling in love with a place that might not be available when we looked in earnest. Finally, when we did look in earnest, it was quickly obvious that our ideal place—single level, small house requiring little maintenance—was not available on the water, at least not without paying a healthy geographical premium.
Opelika/Auburn had not crept into our consciousness as a possible place to live, even though Adelaide had received her master's and doctorate from Auburn University and our younger son earned his bachelor's degree there.
The realization that it just might be home was serendipitous. A friend on the lake whose husband died several years ago was also confronting the downsizing issue. Like us, she had too much space, too much maintenance and too far to go for some of the amenities she wanted. She had eliminated a number of possibilities and was focusing on Opelika/Auburn. And in that area, one of the possibilities was National Village, on the grounds of Grand National, the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail facility developed by the Retirement Systems of Alabama.
Knowing that RSA was behind the project was an additional draw; RSA boss David Bronner's name isn't associated with shoddy stuff.
We made several visits to National Village with our friend and several more on our own.
National Village, we thought, might be a good choice for us. We visited multiple times, talked with people who lived there and looked at the houses. All of the vibrations were positive. Finally, we picked a lot, selected plan and put our money down. Before we left the lake, we made numerous trips to the Thrift Store at Children's Harbor, often carrying things we'd forgotten that we had. And when the good people from the Thrift Store brought their truck to our house, we filled it up, too.
Still, we moved too much to the apartment that is our temporary home, and some of the non-profit thrift stores nearby have benefitted from our excess. Even so, I expect that we will find that we have moved things we don't need into the new digs. Sometimes I recall fondly the discipline imposed by our brief period of living on a boat; with finite space, if you got something new, you needed to get rid of something old. We will try to build that discipline again.
Building a house is an invitation to stress—the last time we built a house I swore I'd never do it again—but our builder tells us our new home will be ready by the middle of August. Assuming there are no last minute hitches, that will give us time to move things and get them put away in stages and still be moved before our apartment lease runs out and football season kicks off.
For the moment, we're just hoping that no hitches develop.
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
