When I moved into my newly built homemore than 10 years ago, the city planted small trees on the front lawns of most of the homes. While many homeowners got spindly young saplings, I was fortunate enough to get a tall, flourishing poplar tree. I confess that, for a little while, my tree was the envy of all my neighbours.

Starting My Next Tree

A
friend who visited me shortly after the planting cautioned that while poplars
are fast-growing trees, their lifespan is also short. She strongly advised me
to start my next tree now.

Well,
10 years later, my poplar is still strong and seemingly healthy, but this
spring, for the first time, I had to cut off many dead branches, probably the
result of the numerous ice storms we had in the past winter.

I
lamented that the tree did not look as full as in past years. Fortunately, with
the help of some pruning and a generous dose of Miracle Gro, my tree flourished
again this summer.

However,
it did get me thinking about starting my next tree. Metaphorically speaking, I
am going through this ‘starting over’ process now that I’m in my 60s, as I
prepare to downsize for the next phase of my life.

To
be truthful, I feel conflicted and ambivalent about leaving my house and
downsizing into an apartment or condominium. As a woman who divorced in her 30s,
I came into home ownership late in life. It took a lot for me to purchase a house
and to maintain it alone.

I
expected that my current abode would be my retirement haven. But, as most women
in their 60s and beyond know, things don’t always turn out as we had planned.

Change Is in the Air

My
neighbourhood is changing, with new people moving in, bringing lots of noise
and high traffic. I lack the sense of community I enjoyed in past years.

A
generation back, things were very different. My mother, for instance, lived in
her own home well into her 80s. But she had extended family living in the same
city, as well as long-term neighbours who looked out for one another.

My
situation is not at all similar. I am a single woman with no close family
nearby. I am starting to feel isolated in my present community, so I am preparing
to plant my next metaphorical tree!

I
have spent the past year cleaning out closets, donating unused goods to
charities, having a garage sale, and selling items online. I’ve almost
completed my downsizing preparation.

So
why am I still living in this house? Quite simply, because it’s home to me – and home is where the
heart is. While my heart is starting to wander away from my present location,
it has not yet found that special next place to call home.

My
search continues, but in the meantime, I am exploring and appreciating the
benefits of staying in my own home a little longer.

Being Ready while Savoring the Present

Downsizing
and relocating are all about being ready, physically and emotionally. In many
cases, due to relocation costs, decisions about moving can be final. No turning
back once the excess furniture, wall prints, and gardening tools have been
sold.

Naturally,
it just makes sense to research all options thoroughly before making what could
be a life changing – and final – decision.

Staying
in your own home a little longer provides time to look around, weigh options,
and carefully consider the pros and cons of relocating. In the meantime, you
can savor every moment you have left in the home you cherish.

Continuous Movement

The
benefits of being active in our senior years are well documented and manifold. Household
chores like yard work, snow shovelling, and cleaning help us to reach our “fit
points” quite quickly.

Additionally,
these activities can provide structure and a sense of accomplishment. I
actually enjoy projects like painting, washing windows, and updating décor.

As
a homeowner, I am never bored in retirement. I have my work cut out for me. The
best part is that I am my own boss, and I can choose my days or hours off as my
mood dictates! I wonder, will I be bored when I leave my house?

Gardens Bring Joy

I truly
believe that gardens are the gift that keeps on giving! As any gardening
enthusiast will attest, planting and caring for a garden can offer the same
benefits of any hobby you immerse yourself in – stress reduction, practising
mindfulness, being in the moment, and even the potential for heightened
spirituality.

I
have filled my front and back yards with gardens. I feel such joy when I look
at the myriad of colours and textures and note how things change each season. For
me, nothing can beat the sense of satisfaction I get from seeing what I have created.

That
said, gardening comes with a price tag! I suffer from rheumatoid arthritis and
often feel the effects of over-exertion the next day.

I
know I cannot sustain this lifestyle forever. But that heightens my
appreciation of the present, knowing that my days in the garden are numbered. I
am starting to think about future hobbies – perhaps water colour paintings of
gardens, where I can still be creative with much less arduous work!

Increasing Home Equity

In
many communities, homes continue to increase in value each year. The longer I
stay in my house, the more equity I am building for my future. As many of us
women will likely live into our 90s and beyond, financial considerations are
important.

Listen to Your Intuitive Self

When
it comes to downsizing and relocating, there is no magic formula for timing. While
I agree with the theory that the time to do this is before you have to,
I also believe that we must feel a sense of peace about the correct time to leave
our homes.

We
mature women are all quite intuitive, and we need to listen to our inner wisdom
regarding what’s best for us. I will continue to tune into that wisdom. But for
now, I will try to appreciate the benefits of staying in my home a little
longer.

What makes you feel conflicted or ambivalent about downsizing or
relocating? How did you make your decision? Do you have any regrets about
moving into your present home? What strategies have you found useful when
deciding to relocate? Please use the comment box to share with our community!

Crystal Kung Minkoff’s Floral Puff Sleeve Dress on Her Instastories

Real Housewives of Beverly Hills 2022 Instagram Fashion

Crystal Kung Minkoff always comes in clutch with giving us the best girly floral dress outfit inspo. This time she came in extra clutch because she shared where to get this particular one. And we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pass on the info along with some Style Stealers below. So get ready to make your closets grow

Sincerely Stylish,

Jess

Click Here to Shop Her Amanda Uprichard Dress

Photo + Info: @crystalkungminkoff

Originally posted at: Crystal Kung Minkoff’s Floral Puff Sleeve Dress

Finally, retirement – the time and freedom to do what we choose. I had no idea how much fun it could be to cut the work cord and step into summer adventure. Just like the kids, I’m disappointed my first summer of retirement is almost over. But I stand with a quip I saw on Facebook:

“You spiced pumpkin latte fans? Back off. We’ve got a few weeks left.”

Growing up, summer was all about helping with farm chores, showing pigs at the county fair and riding bareback with my sister. We relived it this summer when her grand boys enjoyed their first year showing horses and cattle at the 4-H Fair.

When it ended, she shared what the youngest said: “I miss the smell of fair.” Believe me, nothing smells like a cattle barn in 90 degree heat. It brought back a noseful of childhood memories.

Dive into Reading

I did finish Where the Crawdads Sing before the movie release, but I’d planned to read a lot more this summer. Then an even better opportunity came up: a Dive into Readingprogram for kids who needed a boost into the next grade. Hands down, this is the most rewarding of my summer experiences. We met weekly at a local restaurant for breakfast and reading.

The first day the school bus pulled up, I met my two spunky second-going-into-third graders who taught me more about mermaid power than my own imagination could ever muster. I also learned you can never put too much syrup on a single pancake and, yes, we still cry over spilled milk.

The volunteers all agreed we get more out of it than the kids. I don’t have children of my own, so the chance to connect across generations is enlightening. The most important thing I learned is this:

Until third grade, we learn to read. After third grade, we read to learn.

Wow. If a kid misses that transition, she could be stunted for the rest of her life. Wow.

Take Me Out …

If there’s one thing I miss in retirement, it’s my co-workers. I was lucky in my 60s to change direction and fall into an unexpected circle of support. My new real estate brokerage became my tribe – through sickness and health, good times and bad, pandemic or otherwise. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to retire after receiving the “Spirit Award” at last year’s Christmas banquet. It’s hard to put down the pom poms.

Praise the Lord, they haven’t forgotten me. They took us all out to the ballgame! What fun to sit with everyone in the sky box, eating hot dogs and getting sunburned. But I saw them working while I chilled.

When I was grabbing another beer, Jane was on the phone with the title company. Dick was reviewing a document with a client getting cold feet. Sally was arranging a tour of showings. I was so grateful for retirement by the seventh inning stretch, I ate another hot dog.

On That Note

My college roommate and I fiddled with our flutes back in the 70s before packing them away for the next 40 years. When I pulled mine out of storage and started playing again in my 60s, so did she. We are members of a terrific study group called LearnFluteOnline.com.

Speaking of summer fun, how about this rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” with fellow flutists from all over the world?

Playing music with a group is what I missed most during the pandemic, but an instrument to practice was a blessing. I gained enough confidence to join our community concert band last year. We gather to rehearse weekly at the local college, and last night we took the stage for our summer pops concert.

Beatles, Chicago, Stevie, Eagles, Queen, Elvis… The music is the most fun I’ve ever played. Well, since high school when it was first popular.

Back to School

What I miss most about school days was the fresh start every term – something we don’t get very often in real life. Retirement feels like the best fresh start of all. We have so much choice in what we do and learn. The important thing is to keep on doing and learning. Forever. Back to school season is a good time to plan for the year ahead. I love starting a new 18-month calendar book at the end of summer.

Knowing my workhorse PC was limping her last mile, I took advantage of back to school sales and tax free holidays to shop a new machine. While I feared the learning curve, I settled on a MacBook. Within an hour of its delivery, I was standing in line to face the Geek Squad. The teenager assisting me had the patience of a grandmother. My new machine and I are making baby steps, but it still has a lot to teach me.

Back to school is a good time for all of us to knuckle down where we’ve procrastinated. I’ve got a continuing education deadline fast approaching. Good thing summer fun is winding down. Plus, I’m far behind on home chores. The dining room desperately needs paint. Boxes of light fixtures waiting to be installed have been in the living room so long, they’ve become end tables.

But it can all wait until the end of dog days and patriotic holidays. I’m savoring this first summer of retirement until the last streetlight comes on.

Is retirement different from you than what you imagined it would be? What have you involved yourself with since you retired? What activities do you most enjoy now? Do you miss your working days? School days? What do you miss most about them?

Berenice looked horrified. In the group I was running,
she was coming to terms with the idea that she really needed to speak to her
parents about the fact they were coming towards the end of their lives. She had
no idea whether they even had a will, let alone anything else.

“I can’t say anything to them! It’ll seem like I want them to die!,” she wailed, her face screwed up as she agonised about the situation.

In the group that day, we talked more about this challenge,
and Berenice left feeling scared but clearer about what to do about the
situation. She returned the following week, glowing.

“I did it! I did it!” she exploded as she walked into
the room. “And guess what? They were relieved! In fact, they had been wondering
how to mention this to me! We all laughed when we discovered that, sighed with
relief, and then were able to get on with discussing some of the
practicalities.”

Revealing
the Elephant in the Room

This scenario is not unusual, once someone has taken
the plunge and opened up the conversation. But over the years, the medical
establishment and the funeral industry have taken over what was once a very
tender, intimate, and family-based procedure, as bodies were laid out in the
front room and relatives and friends came to pay their respects.

Not that this is necessarily ‘bad’ at all – but it has
rendered us, the general public, as amateurs in the death arena. We are
ignorant. Most of us have never seen a dead body, not even when we reach middle
age.

However, we are forced to face up to it as our grandparents and parents reach a time when it is obvious they are coming towards the end. Or we have a brush with death ourselves, in the form of a friend’s terminal diagnosis, Covid/flu infection, or perhaps a sudden accident in the family.

And yet this is normal – life cannot occur without death and vice versa. So how do we bring death out of the closet and into
our lives, without the terror? We need to start talking about it again.

Here
are some pointers to starting a conversation, and maintaining it, in a world
that is afraid of the one thing that statistics say will happen to 100% of us.

Getting Ready

What do you need to reflect on before you can even
consider having a conversation? Just take a few moments to think about someone
with whom you would like to speak on the subject of end of life. There may be
more than one person, just choose one for now.

Put yourself in their shoes so you can be as sensitive
as possible. Then think about what you consider important about dying, death,
and grief and what you might want to share.

It will be different for different people. For instance,
you or a loved one may be terminally ill; you might just feel strongly about
preparing in advance, or be a proponent of assisted dying.

You might have recently lost someone very close to you,
or you might work in a related field. You might just be the kind of person who
knows that what we fear, but then face up to, can bring a kind of liberation
that is not only unexpected, but also very freeing.

Location

Once you’ve identified a person, the next thing is to
consider when and where would be a good time to talk with them.

Sometimes when you’re walking alongside one another it’s
easier to talk about this kind of thing than it is in a face-to-face situation,
so choosing your moment on a walk might work for you. If you are sitting around
a table, it could be over a cup of tea.

One of my Before I Go course participants invited all
her adult children over for Sunday lunch one day with the express purpose of
talking about this. They had a family business together, so it was doubly
important for them.

Remember that often doing something else, i.e., walking, eating, creating something together, can make it much easier to talk about a challenging matter.

While normally eye contact is a beneficial thing in any
conversation, in this one, it can be more easily done when your eyes only meet
occasionally, and on purpose.

Start the Conversation

How do you start such a conversation? There are lots of ways, but it’s all about context. If a relative or neighbor has recently died, that can provide an opener. If you went to a funeral, or are going to a funeral, that can also provide a starting point.

Even a celebrity dying can make a conversation about death feel appropriate. For instance, when a famous person dies suddenly, as was the case with Ivana Trump, for instance, it is quite acceptable to say, “That makes me think about what I would do in that situation,” and then you lead on from there.

If someone dies without having left a will, it would be entirely normal to ask someone else if they had a will, and if not, why not, or how they had gone about it.

Conversations don’t have to be just with family members;
you can speak with friends, work colleagues, church companions, group members
or anyone at all. Remember you never know how people are going to react until
you open the door on the subject.

Keep an open heart even if the initial response is not
what you would prefer. And once you’ve started, remember to listen!

Think of someone with whom you would like to have this
kind of conversation. What might you say to them and when could you do that?
What’s stopping you? Please share in the comments below.

Prices in the skin care market are notoriously shady. For example, a jar of Crème de la Mer moisturizer goes for $570 for 3.4oz., while a squeeze tube of Weleda Skin Food goes for $26.95 for 30 ml. Then, of course, there is the swanky model posing in the face cream advertisement who never-ever-in-her-entire-life had a wrinkle.

With all the beguilement and bunk, it’s hard to know where the value lays. What’s the baseline difference, and how can you have that luxury skin care feeling on a scrawny budget?

Marketing and Packaging

The biggest determiners of value are not how it a product feels or smells, pretty packaging, or expensive marketing campaigns. Although it can be difficult to see through the rose-colored smoke screen of promised eternal youth, an honest appraisal is necessary.

Ben Fuchs of Truth Treatments Skin Care says, “Most companies spend the majority of their money on the appearance, smell, and feel of a product long before they invest in great ingredients.” Those ingredients, in some cases, are proprietary and usually contain some sort of magical secret ingredient found to take off 20 years and 50 pounds, or some such nonsense.

Before tossing yourself on the floor and having a two-year-old temper tantrum (like I did yesterday), check out the ingredient list.

Concentration

If the active ingredients, like retinol, alpha hydroxy acids, vitamin C, or hyaluronic acid (see below for an important detail on this one) are near the top of the deck, you’re in good hands. If they show up about 20 ingredients down and thus have lower concentration levels, you’re paying for fluff.

For example, a certain brand of vitamin C serum arrived on the market with screaming fans frothing at the mouth to buy it and was even endorsed by a famous celebrity. After checking the ingredient list, I discovered, much to my horror, that the all-important vitamin C was #11 on the deck. The product cost $350. The first 10 ingredients were for texture, color, and smell, otherwise known as fluff. Yikes. It pays to do your homework.

By way of example, say you enjoy tea. I love tea. If I make a lovely cup of English tea and smoosh the tea bag to get out the flavor, then I reuse the tea bag for a second cup, the latter will taste, well, weak and nasty. That’s the difference between having high concentrations of active ingredients in your skin care, and drained-of-life feeble ones.

This means that a drug store option that spends much less on marketing and more on ingredients has the potential to be an excellent product. If you are looking for an inexpensive but effective moisturizer, try the Weleda Skin Food mentioned above. For a mid-range moisturizer, my personal favorite is Image MD SPF 50 Moisturizer.

Potency

Potency on some ingredients is of vital importance. For example, one of the most important ingredients for exfoliation is retinol, or vitamin A. In order for a product to be effective you need above .5% retinol. If you have too high a percentage of the ingredient you could have irritation, redness, and even a break-out.

Therefore, the potency of retinol should be between .5% and 2%. Having said that, I use a 5% retinol and do not have any issues, so reactions will largely depend on your skin.

Hyaluronic acid, on the other hand, is highly irritating if more than 2% is used in a product. Because of this, hyaluronic acid needs to be more toward the bottom of the ingredient deck, or it can be very drying. For an inexpensive Hyaluronic acid, try The Ordinary, and for a more medium range product, try Image MD Restoring Youth Serum.

The Last Word

In the end, there are a lot of solid mid-range and inexpensive products on the market so that you can have luxury skin care on a scrawny budget. Having said that, I’ve talked a lot about bang-for-buck in other articles, and the truth still holds sway that the best products to toss your money at are vitamin C serum and retinol. Given the distinct rise in inflation, though, it’s good to have clear options to save some money where you can.

What do you focus on when looking for skin care products? Do you look at the ingredient list? Where do you like to go more inexpensive?