Milestone

March 23, 2026

Five years have passed since we moved into our place. Five years today, March 23. We closed on the house Feb. 26, 2021. It poured rain that day, we signed everything, went to lunch to mark the occasion, then headed back to our apartment. It then had been three weeks since I finished a month of radiation therapy, three months since the rib-cage operation.

The next day we started loading the boxes we had crammed in the apartment into the van. We hauled them the six miles to the house and piled them in the garage.  The grandsons, Noah and Patrick, greeted us with signs and smiles.

It was then and still is the right place: Greer, South Carolina, one level, so no stairs, gas heat, the front yard bordered by mature greenery, no landscaping needed. The second and third bedrooms are small, closet space is limited, but the garage doubles as storage. It’s just the two of us.

The house had been empty for five years since the previous owner, an elderly widow, moved to a nursing home. We never met her, her nephew dealt with us on the sale. The house was sold to help pay her living expenses.

The place had a strange feel to it. When we tried to set up the internet and couldn’t get the connection, the provider told us there had been no online account since 2013. The lady had dropped the service and lived her remaining time there with neither internet nor email.

The widow’s furniture remained in the house when we first walked through. It was feminine-looking, imitation-antique stuff, well-worn wingback chairs, dark wood endtables, and so on. The master bedroom walls were decorated with flowery wallpaper, long faded. The two smaller bedrooms were painted lilac and pink.  

I found a Bible on a desk, thumbed through it, and scanned the faded handwritten notations. A photograph of a woman stood on a nightstand. The nephew said it was the widow’s daughter, who had passed from cancer some years ago.

We found a painter who painted the walls and removed the popcorn ceiling. We hired a mover to deliver our living room and bedroom furniture. Within a month of our move-in the water heater failed, we replaced it. In July the air conditioning system clanged and roared but provided no cooling. The HVAC was obsolete and could not be repaired, we bought a new system.

The new neighborhood was at first an alien world. We knew no one. The new home was smaller than the Virginia house, where we had accumulated all the stuff that moved with us and would not fit in the new place. Dozens of boxes and excess furniture remained in the garage. The garage was a kind of fun thing, we had never had one.

The backyard was enclosed by a beat-up picket fence. In our second year we looked for a contractor to replace it. We hired the lowest bidder. After we paid him I noticed the picket sections were nailed to the posts in straight rows rather than adjusted to the contours of the terrain, giving the pickets an odd crooked look. A year later picket nails started popping. But I guess the low bidder saved us a few bucks.

In time, we met some neighbors: next door, another retired couple, refugees from Cuba. The fellow is an engineer who got his training in the USSR, on returning to Cuba he fled to the U.S. We’ve seen him sunning himself in the yard in his Speedo. On the opposite side, a single guy who manages a pet store, across the street a friendly young woman with two teenagers.   

We got a few bids on adding a sunroom to replace the beat-up 10×10 deck. After seeing the bids we dropped the idea, I guessed I could refinish the deck instead. For three weeks I spent a half-day or more every day sanding, repairing, and restaining the deck. Since it faces the fierce Carolina sun through the summer, we never go out there. My repairs already are looking old.

The postage-stamp-size lawn is level. We bought an old-fashioned pushmower, the Home Depot clerk looked strangely at me. No gas needed, nor battery, nor cable. Pushing it across the front lawn attracts attention from the landscaping crews who manicure our neighbors’ yards. It’s a stiff shoulder workout. The lawn is getting thicker, the pushing harder.

That first summer we planted sunflowers, marigolds, and zinnias behind the house. They sprouted almost overnight in the rich Carolina clay. Within a month the sunflowers reached eight and ten feet, the marigolds and zinnias bloomed and spread like vines, filling the space with wild color we never saw in our Virginia yard. Giant hostas appeared in thick rows on three sides of the deck, giving a vernal cast to my fading repair work.

The marigolds and zinnias now show up magically in the spring from seeds left in the dirt by last year’s crop. For fun I planted green beans and that down-home Southern classic, okra. The green beans shriveled on the vines, the okra grew and grew. Sandy breaded and fried okra until it wore out its welcome.

In the third year we replaced the homebuilder-standard vinyl kitchen countertop with a stone one with a nice pattern to it. Last year we hired a smart young contractor to rebuild the bathrooms. We called him back to fix some glitches, he was happy to do it.

A friend recruited her daughters to paint the still-unpainted fence, the grandsons and a couple of other kids pitched in, we bought the paint, brushes, and ice cream for a fence-painting party. The boys and girls turned it a gleaming white.

On September 25, 2024 Hurricane Helene hit the Southeast. We were in New Hampshire, where the sun shone brightly. Our daughter Marie sent us a video showing the remains of a giant tree limb that fell from the neighbor’s yard, crushing three sections of our fence. Some folks around town lost power for two weeks. Nearly 50 people died in the state, more than 100 in North Carolina.

After the cleanup I salvaged some unbroken pickets and nailed them back into place. From a distance they look almost even.

We’ve thought again of the sunroom idea. Medical appointments are pending. With Trump bombing Iran, oil prices through the roof, stocks crashing, it’s still a no-go, at this five-year mark. We’re working on six.