From the Editor’s Desk: The Grass is Always Greener (Premium)

We visited with friends and family over the past weekend and my brother, who has moved even more than I have, asked me an interesting and unexpected question: Of all the places we’ve lived, which do miss or like the most?

He had a ready answer to this, and it was very clear-cut in his mind. But I couldn’t come up with even one, and neither could my wife. We were discussing this during the drive later, and we both agreed that each of our homes, whether owned or rented, had its pros and cons. And that while each holds its own memories in our minds, neither of us is particularly nostalgic for any of them.

This point was driven home, pardon the pun, when we drove past one of our previous homes, the house in Dedham that was our longest stay, and where our kids grew up. The current owners have painted it an unfortunate dull gray color that clashes with the gorgeous tan roof we had installed after the disastrous snowstorms of early 2015, and the neighborhood, which was just normal to us at the time, is nothing special, and all the houses are far too close to each other with little privacy. We don’t miss the place at all.

And that’s true broadly: There is no version of our future that involves us moving back to Massachusetts. We have lots of friends and family there and I miss them, but I don’t miss the place. It’s crowded and expensive, and there is a lot of traffic seemingly everywhere at all times. The drivers are at least predictable, but still insane, and I actually had a weird interaction at the same rotary twice on the same day and was not at fault either time. These short trips are good reminders that sometimes memories are best left as memories.

But some of this is true of our current area too. Our last house, the one in Pennsylvania that we moved out of earlier this year, likewise holds no attraction. Despite living just a block over from that development now, I haven’t been by the house even once, and my wife only stopped by once because the current owners texted her when a package for her arrived there. She went over to pick it up and was asked if she wanted to come in and check out what they had done, so she of course said yes. And she got an earful of information that validated our decision to move.

This house is large and is on a good chunk of land with good separation from the neighbors, and my key takeaways were contradictory: As a writer, I loved the quiet, but as one of just two people living in that overly large house, I didn’t like the constant upkeep and other ongoing costs. And neither of us was interested in paying for the all-too-necessary bills to come: We knew that we’d have to replace the two AC units and all of the windows in the house soon, that there were several dead trees that needed to be taken down, and that the sewer line out to the street was a timebomb. All that, and the expensive property taxes, played big roles in our decision to get out of there when we did.

The people who bought the home knew all this going in and didn’t care: They loved the place, still do, and have come to understand, as we did, that the leafy neighborhood it’s in, with its meandering streets and spread apart homes, is a unicorn, something that no developer would ever build today. But they’ve also suffered from the expenses we anticipated: They’re replacing all of the windows now, for example, one of the dead trees had fallen over in a storm and had just missed the house by inches, and the refrigerator and dishwasher, neither of which we’d ever worried about, both managed to die within a week of each other.

This made my wife vaguely happy, not because it inconvenienced them but because we hadn’t had to pay for any of it. These and the other issues I mentioned were always going to happen. We just didn’t want them to happen to us.

As she described this to me, I thought about the condo we’re living in now and how the possibility of buying it might come up when my “stepmother,” its owner, is forced to move into a managed care facility or passes on. My wife and I agree that anything is possible on that score, but the more we step through it, the more that obvious problems get in the way. This place, too, will need to be upgraded, and it has white and very light flooring and carpets everywhere that get dirty too easily. Our furniture is all out-of-date because we’re waiting for the cats, which have ruined all of it, to pass on too. And at that point, don’t we want to spend more time in Mexico anyway? What if this place is too expensive to buy and maintain, and do we really want to pay property taxes again? It’s not hard to talk ourselves out of it. But we don’t know.

What I do know is that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence. If there was something obvious that made sense for us as a home, something that would last a long time, we would just do it. For now, we’re here, and we’ll see what happens. It might be a year. It might be more. It … might be less. My stepmother’s health is not great, sadly. But we’ll do what we have to do.