New Year, New Life

In the nearly two and a half year gap since my last blog post, I’ve done some serious soul searching and made some big decisions about how and where I want to live.

A month after my last post in September 2022, my mother fell and cracked her ribs. She spent a month in the hospital before she was able to come home again, and that gave me a long time to really think about our house and the way we live our everyday lives. It took about six months before she was able to get back to her routines, and in that time, we started thinking about options. Our house was big, and while we loved it, mom couldn’t easily go up the stairs, so a large portion of the space was unused and full of clutter. We both agreed that we were ready to consider moving someplace new. And so, throughout 2023, we began doing some tentative home searches.

Though we have a lot of family members we love dearly and wish we saw more often, when we began exploring the logistics of moving closer to them, cost of living, and the way our everyday lives would look in those various places, we just couldn’t find a way to make those places work for us. Both of us agreed, though, that no matter where we decided to go, we had too much stuff, and it was time to get rid of a lot of things that didn’t serve us anymore. We kept searching for that Goldilocks zone. One place was too hot, one was too cold, one was too expensive…but the perfect place just didn’t materialize.

We began widening our search in the fall of 2023, hoping for some better options. What about Mexico? Water shortages in Mexico City put the kibosh on that idea. What about Canada? The long dark winters are too much for us to manage.

By Spring of 2024, we decided a move to Spain would be worth exploring. Mom had spent a summer session abroad in Valencia back in her 20s, and her Spanish is still passable. We found an area we liked in Northern Spain, and as we continued purging our belongings, we started looking seriously at properties there. I did a lot of research on visa requirements. We began putting money into a savings account to ensure we’d have the required funds to qualify for the non-lucrative visa, the fastest and easiest way to move.

I cashed in my retirement fund. We sold our electric car. We gave clothes and things away to Goodwill or to people we knew truly needed them.

Then one morning, Mom and I were sitting across the table from one another at breakfast, and she said, “You know, you speak better French than I do Spanish, and you have a long life ahead of you. Shouldn’t we look at France as a possibility?”

Of course we should. My Spanish is very rudimentary, but my French is much better. It was my translation language in graduate school. While I haven’t used my conversational skills in French for nearly 30 years, I can still read and translate, and that conversational ability will return if I practice. I will never be that fluent in Spanish.

And when I looked into the French visa requirements, it was much less complicated. If I keep my LLC in the United States, I can keep working in France from home. We can afford to buy property so long as we looked at places outside Paris. We can gain access to the French healthcare system after three months, and the benefits are fantastic for us both. Moving with our dog would be possible too.

We found a potential buyer for the house, and we began frantically getting rid of more and more stuff. I also bought a bunch of suitcases and began packing the items we knew we wanted to take with us into our new life. Everything else would have to go. It was time to get ruthless about purging our closets and storage areas.

In the meantime, we made a list of all the qualities we wanted in a new home.

• A city with a hospital
• A safe, walkable neighborhood
• Living on one level for Mom
• Good public transportation
• Low cost of living
• An expat community of English speakers so Mom could make friends more easily

We also looked at a LOT of climate science so we’d know what the projections for the future looked like. If we’re going that far from everyplace we’ve known, we want to be sure we aren’t going to be in the path of hurricanes or climate change issues we didn’t anticipate. Noplace is going to be untouched by the devastating consequences of climate change. But some areas have risks we are more willing to accept.

Southwestern France filled all those boxes.

We considered larger cities like Bordeaux and Toulouse, but I also took a look at some smaller towns in the region, finally settling on the town of Bergerac as the strongest option.

In early November 2024, Mom and I came to visit the region to visit. We loved Bordeaux, but after a few days there, we agreed it was just too big for us. Mom would struggle getting around by herself, and I want her to have independance for as long as she can. Then we came to Bergerac and fell in love. It has everything we were looking for, and it’s also beautiful, friendly, warm, and totally walkable for Mom. She found herself walking three to five miles a day without effort, even with her cane, and at 84 that’s amazing. We loved the food. We loved the architecture. We loved the history. We loved the people. There’s a good hospital and an extensive bus service. Bordeaux and Toulouse are easy train rides away if we want to do big city things, but Bergerac just felt right. By the end of our exploratory trip, we knew this was the place for us. Our future home. Our Goldilocks place.

Upon returning home, we got serious about making this move happen with a new sense of urgency. We gathered everything we needed for our visas, reserved a short term apartment and airline tickets, and then took those documents to Chicago to apply to the consulate. During the two week waiting period, we took our doggo to get all the veterinary requirements for her to move with us. We took carload after carload of things to auction. We threw away, recycled, and donated everything we could.

And finally, after the holidays were over and the New Year had begun, we took my old purple clown car (Honda Fit) to the auction house, stuffed our few belongings and the dog into a rental car, and drove to Chicago just ahead of a blizzard. We had two nights in the hotel, and then we were off to the airport. My niece and her husband met us there and flew over to help me with getting from Paris Charles de Gaulle airport to Bergerac by train so our doggo didn’t have to do any more flying. It was an arduous journey with multiple missed connections, but at last we made it here, safe and sound.

We arrived after dark and walked in the rain to our Airbnb, collapsing into our beds in exhaustion.

But we made it. We did what had initially seemed nearly impossible. We were fine. We were warm. We were together. And the most difficult part was behind us.

In the morning, the rain cleared. As a group, we walked to have breakfast and to see the house we’d loved in the online listings. Mom and I both felt like we’d come home.

We are realistic, however. Buying a house in France takes time, much longer than in the United States, and we have a lot of steps to take before we can close on any property. Whether we buy that house or another one, though, we know this is the town for us. We’re starting a new chapter, and we could not be happier about it. I can’t wait to focus on writing again and settling into a new rhythm.