A Place for Us

By D.L. Fedchock

We planned a trip to New England ostensibly to celebrate my six decades on earth. Actually we were searching for the last move of our lives—into retirement and sadly, out of Ithaca after eleven years. Our daughter and our two grandchildren live here too, as stable and steady as this rarified bubble allows, accepted and mostly happy. So we took a trip back to the place we eloped to a little over forty years ago—Amherst, Massachusetts — and hoped to find a welcoming (and affordable) place to live out the rest of our story.

We related to Harry and Meghan as a couple with an inclusive worldview whose family, like ours, represents a well blended mix of colors and cultures in our community. And like them, we were searching for our particular place in the world during an important turning point in our journey. However, my husband and I are simply two middle class retiring late boomers lamenting the hope of ever seeing in our hometown what we discovered on our trip—comfortable reasonably priced retirement homes.

The Five College area in western Massachusetts where I married and gave birth, like Ithaca, is world famous