The Retirement of a Lifetime

Apartment living at Piper Shores offers residents affordable, fully updated homes, with all the benefits of Maine’s first and only nonprofit lifecare retirement community. Located along the Southern Maine coastline, our active, engaged community combines worry-free independent living with priority access to higher levels of on-site healthcare—all for a predictable monthly fee. Call ready for company. “I just toss my piles of wool into baskets, add a vase of flowers to a table, and nobody’s the wiser,” she says.

The spruce-green living room is bright and cozy, decorated with Oriental rugs, nature-walk finds, antiques, and beautifully displayed tools of her trade. A shabby-chic slipcover graces a roll-arm sofa with down cushions purchased 30 years ago at Bloomingdale’s. “My mother told me to spend money on upholstered furniture and lamps because those are pieces that last,” Decatur explains. “Well, here we are, many slipcovers later.” She’s collected white alabaster lamps from Italy for years because, like white furniture, they work everywhere.

Playful vignettes starring her handmade creatures are staged at every turn, transforming rooms into a sort of enchanted felted world. (One day, she hopes to turn these scenes into a series of children’s picture books.) Down on the floor, a parade of fuzzy ducklings ascend a tiny plank. Up on the wall, a parliament of felted owls perch on a reclaimed wooden shelf. “I’m most known for my owls,” she says. “They’re all true to size, with realistic markings.”

The felting studio is through French doors off the living room, in what would normally be considered the den. Decatur, however, hasn’t owned a television for more than a decade. Rag rugs are scattered across the wood floor. A worktable and cubbies hold skeins of wool in earth and jewel tones, along with felted critters both complete and in progress.

In the country kitchen, a long white linen-draped table, situated under a pair of windows with grand mountain views, does double duty for felting and eating. A marble slab that she’s been hauling around for 30 years—it once topped an old Victorian bureau—now sits on the counter for rolling out piecrusts.

Decatur’s bedroom, on the second floor across from her painting studio, is an airy haven with odd angles that magically reflect the sunlight. “When I peek in during the day,” she says, “it’s glowing.” The old Victorian bed, acquired on her travels and painted off-white, is dressed in pink printed sheets and vintage 1930s and ’40s floral pillowcases.

It’s in this room that Decatur displays sentimental tokens, such as old black-and-white photos of her parents; a framed sweater—a gift from a family friend—that she wore home from the hospital when she was born; and a childhood drawing of her mother on a chaise. “It’s the first portrait I ever made,” she says. “Of course there’s a butterfly; every picture that year had a butterfly.” Even then, nature was front and center.