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So, then, the feasibility of a rural life would depend on how much urban convenience we are willing to trade off for the pleasures of a quieter and simpler existence.
Quiet and simple lives can be had in a multitude of environments.
I'm still fairly "young" and driving 30 miles is way too much. I'm a city girl. I'm looking to have all of my essentials within 5 miles.
Quote:
Originally Posted by charlygal
Quiet and simple lives can be had in a multitude of environments.
Sure. One person's quiet is another person's noisy. I remember someone who spent their life in the city, in close proximity to an elevated train track, describing his experience in the country. He couldn't sleep at night because of the crickets.
Quiet and simple lives can be had in a multitude of environments.
Maybe but it is easier to find quiet and simple in a rural area. That is one reason I have never had an interest in rural living. I am not looking for quiet and simple. I don't like noise, but I do like a level of excitement, stimulation, variety.
If we adopt a fatalist attitude of 'when the good Lord wants me, the good Lord is gonna take me', then a rural lifestyle is totally doable because we aren't caring where the nearest cardiac care center is.
Not if your spouse doesn't share that attitude.
Ideally this would all be talked out ahead of time. But ideals tend to go out the window when the event happens. How many people who insisted on a DNR have been resuscitated anyway? I think it's more than a few.
Yet another factor, is that said communities are/were dying in the first place. Walmart, and internet-shopping, allow retired-people (or those willing to tolerate long commutes) to continue residing in said town without the further inconvenience of loss of staple-goods shopping. These newfangled options might be deleterious for mom-and-pop commerce, but perhaps they slow down (even if helpless to entirely stave off) the town’s overall decline. What they do unfortunately produce, is a transformation from the old-timey, folksy, hand-built/personal-attention vibe of a Normal Rockwell small-town, towards a faceless and anodyne suburbia… which of course raises the question, as to whether one ought to remain in said town, if the whole essence of living there was to enjoy the folksiness and neighborly rapport. Did I just contradict myself?
This is only true in the more affluent metropolitan regions. Exhibit A, is what happened in Northern Virginia over the past 40 years. I arrived there in the early 1980s, and even then, the western reaches of Fairfax County were rural, dotted with farms. Today they're all condos. But in the Midwest, with the exception of Chicago, I'd suspect no such thing. If the anchor-city is dying, not merely through suburban-flight but in the overall metro area, then there's no impetus for builders to buy up the surrounding farms.
Indeed, one of the advantages of retiring in the semi-rural ring around a thriving metro area, is that one's land is going to appreciate, as development moves outwards. So, just as one is approaching the final stretch of life's race, there's excellent opportunity to cash-in on price-appreciation of one's acreage. Try to replicate that in Rustberg or Rustoria or Rustville, and you may find that the acreage that you bought at age 60, has become worth less (in numerical dollar terms, let alone accounting for inflation) than when one's ready to move on, at 85.
I grew up on the edge of town in Wisconsin - not far from rural towns. I go back there now - and where I grew up is probably 10 miles from the edge of town now. The farms are gone.
The small city I live in now in the Salt Lake Valley had a population of 50K when we moved here 27 years ago. It has doubled.
We're looking in semi-rural California - too far to commute to a "job" therefore not inviting. We have no illusions that there will be growth out to that area within 20 years.
My wife and I are both in our late 80s, and we moved from big city life to a more rural town, 50 miles to a city of 100,000. We have a large independent grocery store/drug store, a hardware store, for our basic needs. There is a tire store, and an auto dealer in town that can take care of our vehicles, and a gas station. We buy non perishable groceries on line, and our other needs the same. A lot simpler than driving 50 miles each way in one direction, and 90 miles each way the other to go shopping.
The hospital is new, but more for basic care, and is a trauma center, and as part of the building there is a medical center with 4 doctors. It is 50 miles to the city for a great hospital which our local hospital,medical center is part of the medical system. The medical system has ambulances, and one of the few medical systems in the country, that owns its 2 air ambulance helicopters, plus 3 twin turbo air ambulance airplanes that allow this to be the major hospital system for northern half of Wyoming, The Western half of the Dakotas, Montana, and a Big Section of Southern Canada. It is good enough, it has been accepted as one of only 7 medical systems in the U.S. as an affiliate of the Mayo Clinic. Some specialists from the big hospital in the city such as my cardiologist , come here once or twice a month holding office hours. We have a teleconference room with a fantastic setup of test equipment, where a specialist in the city or May Clinic, can have a local technician administer tests with the patient hooked up here at the hospital, and the Specialist supervising everything including the instruments hooked up for the test are being read directly by the specialist when needed.
Our basic needs are being taken care of, our medical needs are taken care of, and we can do our shopping on line.
We have a housekeeper that comes in 3 days a week to care for our 3700 sq. ft. 4 level (not stories) home that has had 3 chair lifts installed so we don't have to climb chairs. If and when needed, she is always standing by if we need to be driven somewhere using our car. We have an acre landscaped out of our 5 acre property which is directly across the county road from best area of town, and our housekeepers teen age son care for it in the summer (one son has grown and left the area and the second son now has that job). Our tractor drops the mower in the winter, and our snow blade is attached to keep us plowed out when it snows and the yard boy does it. Her family has been with us for 5 years, and is more like a granddaughter than an employee. We pay her well, at $18 an hour, and we are her only one she works for.
I am telling about ourselves, to show that older people can live very well in rural areas, if they are careful and pick a rural area, where they can have what they need, or have easy access to. On Line Shopping, makes it even easier to live rural. Instead of having to go away to shop, I have not found anything we have needed including things like a part for the lawn mower, etc., we cannot get on line and usually at a better price. My wife's coffee maker just blew up, so a few minutes ago, I ordered her a new one to be here on Wednesday for about half of what I could buy one at the local hardware store. The stores are only 1 mile from our home, but I ordered on online in less time than I could drive down to the local store.
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