Weather or Not
For as long as I can remember, I have advised myself and others that the selection of a long-term or retirement residence should be based on those people closest to one’s soul. They may be parents, siblings, children or friends, the circumstances of and social conventions of one’s particular family will likely set the priorities or preferences. But the choice of retirement home is even more challenging than, say, any other residence that one takes up since it happens along with a wholesale change in lifestyle, thereby making the necessary adjustments quite substantial. Naturally, a major consideration of the aging process is to prefer warmer weather and to specifically avoid the winter cold of the north. But nonetheless, it seems trivial and flighty to base a permanent move on something as superficial as the weather. And that was all before climate change has thrown our expectations for the weather into a proverbial cocked hat.
People need to make their long-term locational decisions on the basis of where their connectivity is best, not based on where the weather suits them. But then again, who knows where all of that is going. People used to move for their jobs in my day. Now they move despite their jobs. Virtual and hybrid work patterns are far more the norm now and the surge in home office necessity (as opposed to nice to have) can be noted on every DIY or Home Hunters show you watch on HGTV. I myself do business virtually in my expert witness business and do so with two partners who live in Palermo, Italy and Lisbon, Portugal respectively. In two years they have traveled once to New York (I didn’t see them since at that time I was here on my hilltop). They have been running a good strong business in that manner since just before COVID and not because COVID caused it. I think COVID helped them or caused them at least to stay put and burn up the WiFi even more than expected, but the point is that it has and continues to work just fine for all of us including the clients.
We moved out here to San Diego area far less due to the weather (though it didn’t hurt the decision at all) and far more because we have a total of a combined four siblings with spouses and now four half-siblings with spouses in the nearby areas. We left behind in New York three kids with spouses or significant others and two grandkids. One could claim that is a toss-up situation, but we moved when bi-coastal existence was less concerning (pandemically speaking), but the advantage went to aging siblings and the thought that kids gotta fly. What I mean by that is that I have been brought up to believe that kids need space to do their own thing in adulthood and that may or may not include considering proximity to me to be a “must do.” Indeed, one kid and spouse has already moved south to Delaware and another, while still in Brooklyn, finds that spending winter months and generally more and more time distant from NYC is to his liking.
On the other side of the equation, our thinking has been that being close to aging sibs might be important since Kim and I are both he youngest in our direct clans with an elderly factor of up to twelve years difference. Indeed, there have been medical issues in abundance and there has been some improvement in the ability to be of service to those needs, but the real advantage has been more about being close enough to lend moral support and being more able to gather to commune in general rather than fetch and lift anything. The older one gets (especially in a pandemic), the more homebound one tends to get, and the traveling we do tend to do is far less about sightseeing and far more about simply spending time together. While the latest Omicron surge is yet to tell its tale in terms of travel curtailment, we see a newer form of issue in the inability of airlines to staff their flights adequately and having to cancel flights over the holidays. It seems that might be more rather than less short-lived since Omicron has a faster lifecycle, but then again its rate of spread would imply that the phenomenon might not go away so fast either. The point is that the one sightseeing trip we have on the books to Italy in March (what will be our first foray into the international arena) is far enough out that we are as yet uncertain about the COVID impact thereon. But we did gather as a family at Christmas on this coast with two local members absent for possible infection reasons and they did gather back east, so the emphasis on communal and familial gathering remains in tact.
We are all learning to live with a continual testing protocol but to suggest that it is all getting old and the that the feelings of inevitability of infection linger is an understatement. Kim is with cold right now, but keeps testing negative. I am without symptoms but will also test early next week. We are due to travel to Florida at the end of next week and while that is not for family, it is to commune with old friends that have either decided to gather or already lodge through their winters in the Sunshine State. The decision to abort will be on the table until the last minute and the price of cancellation is one of the new line items in all of our budgets.
But what is vexing me this morning as I wade through the in-between holiday week is that the weather here in Sunny Southern California has, quite simply, sucked for the last few weeks. This is easily the worst weather month I have experienced on the hilltop. My concern for insufficient water has turned into a concern for too much rain and its impact on both my chain gang back hillside work and the tuberescence of some of my cacti. I don’t recognize this weather at all. It feels weird to be chilled and wet more than warmed and dry around here. I am treating this like an anomaly, but it has been lingering so long that I now lack confidence in the morning light I see around the blackout shades in the bedroom. I slept almost eight uninterrupted hours last night (that is a sure sign that the world is going to hell around me) and awoke to steel-grey skies covering 80% of the horizon. Now I just got a message that my sturdy massage therapist, Andrew, is ill and not coming for my long-overdue massage. My world is crumbling around me.
But alas, I look to the north and can clearly see the San Jacinto and San Bernardino mountains not capped with snow, but covered with snow from bottom to top. I think the skiing must be good that we had better be cautious if we go some day soon to meet our pals Gary and Oswaldo across the mountains to Palm Springs. Then I get a Snapchat from my daughter showing me my two granddaughters skiing up a storm at good old Greek Peak in upstate New York. Life goes on and the world renews. The weather will go dry again soon and the sun will shine again on both coasts. We and our siblings will get older just as the kids and grandkids will grow and prosper, and medical science will allow us to carry on a bit more weather or not we deserve to.