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Around the House: Should You Move Now, or Stay Put?
The passing of time makes many things more pressing, and that includes where we want to spend most, if not the rest, of our lives.
It’s almost October – again! Every month seems like it’s come back around faster and faster as the years pass. Holidays, too. Didn’t we just take the Christmas tree down?
The passing of time makes many things more pressing, and that includes where we want to spend most, if not the rest, of our lives. We live in a small house in the woods in rural New Jersey, not far from Lambertville and New Hope (PA), but six miles from a town. We’ve talked for several years about moving to a place where we could walk to a coffee shop, and have next door neighbors, and see people walking into town. More importanntly, it’s a small house on 26 acres of wooded land. It was a one-room house when it was built long ago, and it’s just not good for two aging men. Rickety stairs to the basement where the laundry machine is. One bedroom, with a makeshift guest room in the A-frame attic. Two cats. No writing room for me!
I keep saying now is the time to get serious about moving. I’ll be 68 in October, and I know I’ll have no desire to move when I’m 80. I also want to find a new house while we’re still at an age to really enjoy it. Decorating. Gardening. Make it special. And enjoying it for more than a few years before that whole assisted-living thing becomes a consideration.
And I think the time has come. Hopefully a year from now we’ll either be moved, or in the proccess of moving. So what are the things to consider as so many of us find ourselves at this crossroads?
When is the right time?
There’s no magic birthday. But there are signs. The stairs that used to be nothing are now something. The yard that was a pleasure is now a chore list. The house has rooms nobody goes into except to dust them (or not enough rooms at all). Maybe you’ve outgrown the place, or the neighborhood has changed around you, and home doesn’t feel like home anymore.
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Savvy Senior: Helping an Aging Parent Manage Their Money
By Jim Miller
She’s proud and insists on doing things herself, but I worry she’s falling behind
Dear Savvy Senior,
Since my dad passed away last year, my 82-year-old mother has struggled to keep up with her bills. She’s proud and insists on doing things herself, but I worry she’s falling behind. How can I help her manage her finances without upsetting her?
–Concerned Daughter
Dear Concerned,
You’re not alone – lots of adult children step in to help aging parents with their finances. Whether it’s paying bills, handling bank accounts, filing insurance claims, or sorting through taxes, taking on these responsibilities can feel tricky. The key is to approach it with respect, organization, and the right safeguards. Here’s how to help your mom without stepping on her independence.
Have a conversation
Talking about money can be sensitive, especially with a parent who values doing things on her own. Start with a gentle, respectful conversation. Share your concerns and offer to help with her bills or other chores. If you have siblings, loop them in too. Knowing the whole family is on the same page can reassure your mom that everyone cares, not that you’re taking over.
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Devil’s Wood Audiobook Now on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast Two Chapters at a Time (1 and 2)
Follow author Mark McNease deep into the Devil’s Wood.
An ancient people. A tree that has stood seemingly forever. And a walking stick that must possess anyone who possesses it.
Two chapters at a time, only on the Fearsome Fiction podcast. You can purchase the entire audiobook on Spotify and select online retailers.
Enter the Devil’s Wood. But be warned: you may never leave.
And now… fasten your headphones, and tell someone your last known location. The Devil’s Wood dotcom.
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From the Book Bin: Douglas Stuart’s Quitely Devastating ‘John of John’
Book Review: John of John by Douglas Stuart
A story about fathers and sons, faith and shame, and the long silences that can pass for peace.
Douglas Stuart’s first two novels lived in the tenements of 1980s Glasgow. His third takes the ferry west, to the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides in the late 1990s. It’s a quieter book than Shuggie Bain or Young Mungo, and in many ways a braver one.
Cal Macleod is 22, fresh out of art college in Edinburgh, and broke. Twice on Sundays and once on Wednesdays, he waits at a phone box for his father to call from Harris and sing the day’s Gaelic psalm, expecting Cal to sing it back. They don’t talk much. John mentions that Cal’s grandmother hasn’t been well; Cal keeps quiet about the men he’s sleeping with.
So Cal goes home to the croft where John raises sheep and weaves tweed. His grandmother, Ella—a Glaswegian who refuses to speak Gaelic and holds on to her profanity-laced English—turns out to be fairly vigorous, and the summons serves another purpose. On the crossing, an elderly passenger asks Cal who he belongs to, and he recites his lineage: “John of John of Ian of Ian the Breabadair.” Breabadair means weaver. On this island, you are who your father was.
The friction arrives on schedule. John is a deacon in a church that still shames backsliders in public and chains up the swings on the Sabbath. Cal has dyed his long hair, wears torn jeans, and has no interest in joining the elect in the front pews. John raises his hand to him. Cal answers a “Men Seeking Men” ad in the newspaper.
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Health Beat: Why Getting Up Gets Harder—and What to Do About It
Mark McNease
This article was inspired by true events. I was on the floor organizing a kitchen cabinet realized I may never get up again.
There’s a sound many of us make now when we rise from a low couch. It’s somewhere between a grunt and a sigh, and it usually comes with a hand pushing off a knee. If you’ve caught yourself making it, you’re in good company. Getting up from a chair, out of a car, or off the floor is one of the first everyday movements to feel harder with age. The good news: much of that difficulty is reversible.
What’s actually going on
The biggest culprit is muscle loss. Starting around our 30s, we lose muscle mass gradually, and the pace picks up after 60. Doctors call it sarcopenia. Standing up asks a lot of the thighs and hips—the quadriceps and glutes do most of the lifting—and those are the muscles that tend to shrink fastest when we sit more and move less.
Strength isn’t the whole story. Power matters too—the ability to produce force quickly. The fast-twitch muscle fibers responsible for quick bursts decline faster than the slow, steady ones. That’s why you may be able to walk a mile but still struggle to launch yourself out of a deep armchair. Rising is a short, explosive movement, and it’s the explosive part we lose first.
Then there are the joints. Stiff hips, sore knees, and tight ankles limit how far forward you can shift your weight over your feet, which is the key move in standing. Without that forward lean, you’re trying to lift yourself straight up with your arms and thighs, the hardest way to do it.
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This Week’s Journaling Theme: Rest and Permission
Mark McNease
This Week’s Journaling Theme: Rest & Permission
These are themes I use in my Your Write Path thematic journaling workshops. Write 800-1000 words on the main theme,. Sub-prompts are provided as a way to get you thinking. Use one of them, all of them, or none of them. The writing is the point.
As the season shifts and the days grow shorter, there’s an invitation to slow down. Trees lose their leaves, nature cools, and everything around us seems to rest a little This month, we consider resting ourselves.
For many of us, slowing down doesn’t come easily. We’ve learned to equate worth with productivity—the busier we are, the more we’re accomplishing—and stillness can feel unfamiliar, even uncomfortable. But rest isn’t something we have to earn. It’s something we can claim, the same way the trees do we they prepare to rest for winter. This month’s journaling invites you to notice where you’ve been withholding rest from yourself, and to explore what it might look like to welcome it.
Sub-Prompts
What does rest actually feel like for you? Not the idea of rest, but the felt sense of it. In your body, your mind, your day. Is it quiet? Is it slow? Is it something you recognize when it happens, or does it slip past you unnoticed? Does it make you uncomfortable, as if life is passing by, or you’re failing to get things done? Write about what genuine rest looks and feels like.
Where in your life do you need to give yourself more permission? Permission to pause, to say no, to leave something unfinished, whether you return to it or not, to choose comfort over accomplishment.
Write about a time you kept doing something when you should have paused or walked away. What was the result? What did you learn from it? Sometimes our bodies and hearts tell us to stop long before we’re willing to listen. Reflect on something you kept doing when you could have given yourself permission to stop or move on. And what might it have looked like to let go?
What would it mean to trust yourself more? Rest requires a kind of trust that the world won’t fall apart if you stop, and trust that you deserve care, from yourself or others. Write about what it would mean to trust yourself enough to rest.
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Tech Talk: Streaming Subscriptions and What You’re Actually Paying For
Mark McNease
If you’re like we are, so many of the shows you want to see are on separate streaming services. At some point, subscribing to them all costs more than the old cable service we got rid of in part to save money.
Somewhere along the way, cutting the cord stopped being less expensive. A household with Netflix, Disney+, Max, Paramount+, and Peacock—all without ads, which they now make you pay an additional charge not to see—is paying more than $130 a month, which is close to what a full cable package used to run. The subscriptions didn’t get more expensive one at a time; they crept up together, a dollar or two at a renewal here and there, and most of us never sat down to add it all up.
The first place to look isn’t the biggest bill, it’s the ad-supported version of a service you already have. Nearly every major streamer now offers a version with commercials for roughly half the price of the ad-free plan, and the actual library of shows and movies is usually identical. Netflix’s ad tier runs about nine dollars a month against twenty for its ad-free Standard plan; Paramount+ is about nine dollars with ads against fourteen without. Unless a service auto-enrolled you in ad-free at signup—and most do—you may be paying double for something you can turn off in a settings menu, not a phone call.
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Around the House: Organizing a Smaller Kitchen:
Mark McNease
Organizing a Tiny Kitchen: Big Storage, Small Footprint
We looked at a house for sale today in a town nearby. Moving is something we’ve talked about for several years, but keep findings reasons not to do. On of the big motivators is simply how small our little house in the woods is. I see pictures of kitchens that look like we could both be in them without having to excuse ourselves for bumping into each other. It’s not tiny, but it’s not spacious. Here are some ways we can maximize the space we have no matter the size.
You don’t need a big kitchen to run out of room in it. A cook in a two-bedroom house and a cook in a four-hundred-square-foot studio hit the same wall eventually—not enough places to put things. The fixes cost less than a dinner out, and none of them require tearing out a single cabinet.
Start with pull-out shelving. A standard base cabinet wastes most of its own depth, since anything stored past the first foot disappears into the dark until you’re on your knees digging for it. Pull-out shelf kits slide into most existing cabinets with a screwdriver and about twenty minutes—no carpentry involved. Homeowners ready for a bigger project can go further with soft-close drawer conversions, but renters don’t need to: most of these kits mount to the shelf itself, not the cabinet frame, so the original woodwork stays untouched and the security deposit stays safe.
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Still Here: A Workshop for LGBTQ+ Journalers (November 18, 21)
MEET MARK MCNEASE IN A VIDEO HERE
Every life is a story, and each of us is the storyteller.
See a PDF of the workshop here
Wednesday, November 18
2:00 – 4:00 pm Eastern via Zoom $40
REGISTER HERESaturday, November 21
10:00 – 12:00 pm Eastern via Zoom $40
REGISTER HEREI discovered when I first started doing workshops almost three years ago that these are intimate, safe spaces. Participants follow the writing wherever it takes us, and sometimes that is not such a comfortable place.
I’ve designed a workshop specifically for LGBTQ+ participants. As an older, married gay man myself, I know there are experiences unique to this community, and how difficult it can be to revisit, let alone share in a workshop setting, those events, people and experiences that shaped us – for better and sometimes for worse.
Still Here is intended to provide the space to go there. I’ll be doing one-off introductory workshops, and hopefully setting up some ongoing monthly workshops, much like the ones I already do at the New Hope Free Library and the Hunterdon County Library’s main branch. (And a biweekly in-person group in Lambertville, NJ).
Please email your interest using the QR code, or directly to: StillHere AT YourWritePath.NET. Ready, set, write!
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Savvy Senior: Medicare and Moving: What You Need to Know
Savvy Senior
by Jim MillerDear Savvy Senior,
I’m planning to move later this year to be closer to my youngest son and his family. I’ve lived in the same state for decades, so I’m a little nervous about how this might affect my Medicare coverage. Will I need to change plans or take any special steps to avoid gaps?
–Relocating Rita
Dear Rita,
Great question. A move like this is exciting, but it’s smart to think ahead about how it could affect your coverage. Whether your Medicare is impacted – and what you’ll need to do – depends on the type of plan you have. Here’s what to expect and steps to take before and after your move.
Original Medicare
If you’re enrolled in original Medicare (Part A and Part B), you’re in the simplest situation. Your coverage will go with you anywhere in the United States, so you won’t need to change your plan when you move.
That said, you do need to update your address so you don’t miss important notices like your Medicare Summary Notice or billing statements. The easiest way to do that is online through your “my Social Security” account at ssa.gov/myaccount using the “My Profile” tab. If you don’t already have an account, you can set one up in just a few minutes. Or, you can call Social Security at 800-772-1213 and have them update it for you.
