What happens when a free-wheeling seventy-four-year-old woman gives up her carefree RVing lifestyle and moves into an over-55 community?
Follow Gerri Almand's real-life efforts to adjust to her new home, complete with hysterical and poignant insights about growing old. She struggles to adjust to failing health in both herself and her husband as they forge new lives. Her angst mushrooms into a nervous panic as she looks around her neighborhood and questions whether she belongs with all these old people.
From her kitchen window, Almand has a bird's-eye view of the multiple first responders coming into her neighborhood, notes a rapidly revolving door as old residents leave and new ones move in, and attends her first community estate sale, horrified to find strangers pawing through the detritus of her former neighbors. Anxiety mounts as she realizes these horrors will likely be hers in the future.
Almand makes concerted semi-successful efforts to become accepted in her new community. She learns of the pain of loneliness in the senior years as she watches the dating efforts of several older friends. She discovers multiple deteriorating body parts and questions whether anything would ultimately make things better at her age. Ultimately, she adjusts and finds happiness in her new life, relieved to have yet another midlife crisis resolved.
Gerri Almand's true story of finding gravity in her over-55 community will bring laughs, groans, and aha moments of understanding in anyone over the age of forty. This book is a baby boomer's delight.