Coprolite
Active Member
Hell, my folks lived in a big old 1970s house in the Bon Accord with a huge yard. It was a good option when I was a kid because we were a family of five and my mom really liked to garden. But then things hit the point where all of us were gone and it was a bit on the big and empty side a lot of the time. My dad actually floated the idea of moving into a condo apartment, after a complex was built in Gibbons of all places just above the river valley, but my mom really liked her garden. Then my dad died and my mom hit the phase in mourning where she really wanted to downsize all of his things and it became a really cavernous, empty place that was a lot of work to keep clean. Then my mom had her second battle with cancer, her sister flew in and the two of them rented an air BnB in a condo apartment downtown, and she started thinking something like that would suit her well. The idea rather took when suddenly maintaining that garden seemed like so much more work, even with the help of friends. When it was time to start her radiation, she stayed in an outpatient residence on the U of A campus. And she saw a lot of the kinds of places I lived in: first a secondary suite, then a little house in the core. Driving was also getting to be more of a burden for her, and she was increasingly wary of doing it after dark or when the weather was bad, and she started to really like the idea of having more things to walk to. By the time her third battle with it came along, which led to her moving into an assisted living facility on Whyte for the remainder of her life, she was well and truly burnt out on the idea of a big house and big yard.
I'm positive that whatever I have now, I'm not going to want a bigger house that's further from everything as time goes by. I'm only going to get less able and less inclined to deal with that kind of model.
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