Minne-so-tan..

Part I

Getting There

I guess you could say that Child #3 is responsible for us now being Minnesotan, or, as they say in the Minneapolis area we have recently started to call home – "Minne-so-tan". It still sounds a little strange to my Long Island/New York ears, ears that have spent the past 32 years in the far north suburbs of Chicago. But here we are, retired, downsized and relocated to the city of Brooklyn Park, outside of Minneapolis. When so many of our fellow boomers head south at this stage of their lives, how did we end up here? My husband jokingly says it's because the Chicago winters just weren't cold enough for us, but the truth is a bit more complicated than that. It is a move 15 years in the making, though there are times it has felt a lot longer.

It began when our youngest daughter, in a desire to establish her own Big Ten identity, applied to the University of Minnesota her senior year of high school. She had looked at, then turned down, her older sister's alma mater, the University of Illinois, and then did the same with her older brother's University of Iowa. Child #3 loved the urban Minneapolis campus she had chosen and stayed in the area after graduating college. While Child #3 was still an undergraduate, Child #1, already graduated from and working for her small town university, was looking to move to a larger city. A graphic designer, Child #1 visited Child #3 with portfolio in hand and checked out potential employers. One hired her on the spot, and we found ourselves with two children in Minneapolis. Both met guys, got married and settled in the city.

We had been empty nesters for some time before my husband and I retired, so downsizing and moving somewhere else was always part of the plan. Neither of us are fond of the heat, so with two children in the cold climes of Minnesota, the Minneapolis area was as good a place as any for us to retire to. Just as we started the dejunking and repainting that precedes this kind of move, we were delayed by back-to-back medical detours. An unwanted diagnosis followed by surgery followed by another unwanted diagnosis, followed by treatment then surgery then a year long recovery put a full stop on our moving plans. Since both unwanted diagnoses were mine, it substantially slowed down my dejunking and repainting, and our move was put on hold for two years.

Recovered and back to climbing ladders with paint brush in hand, I painted and cleaned, gave away stuff and more stuff, called a realtor and started collecting boxes. By this time Child #2, tired of the long daily commute to his job in the Chicago area, took a job in Rochester, Minnesota, where he had a short walk to work and a short drive to anything else in town. He was also an easy 90 minute drive to his sisters in Minneapolis, so our plan to relocate there now brought us close to all three of our kids.

Then the pandemic struck. Yes, we could show our house in the midst of it, buy a new place in the midst of it, but did we really want to have that much social contact in what was then still a pre-vaccine world? I thought of the dozens of trips to Walmart and Home Depot that every move entails in the weeks after buying a new place. Did we want to add that to our daily exposure to whatever strain of covid might be out there? We decided to postpone our move until we were fully vaccinated.

And that did happen, eventually. What also happened about the same time as said vaccinations was that the sewer pipe from our house to the main village sewer line no longer sloped in the proper direction. The fix was far from simple, and about the time we had planned to have the house listed with the realtor we found ourselves with a twelve foot deep ditch in our front yard, extending from the porch, through the street and into the yard of our neighbors across the street. It was not pretty, and neither was the additional 50 feet of sewer pipe in the basement that was necessary to reconfigure the proper angle of the outgoing sewer line. And we got to pay for all of this ourselves since it was a problem with our sewer line and not the one belonging to the village.

Our realtor was unfazed by the six foot wide mound of dirt that now snaked across our front yard. It was a sellers' market, she said. The house was great, she said. They would figure out the lawn repair, she said. She recommended listing our house the morning we were leaving for Minneapolis to visit our daughters, our first trip since the beginning of the pandemic. Our selling realtor connected us to a buying realtor in the Minneapolis area, so our trip up north would become a townhome-hunting adventure as well. We headed out on the road at 9 am and by noon we had received notifications for 12 scheduled showings for our lovely house with the new sewer system and the not-so-lovely front lawn.

Well, God is good, and so was our realtor. Twenty four hours later we had five offers on our house, all above listing price and one high enough to cover most of the cost of the sewer repairs. This offer also had a flexible closing date, no contingencies and contained the magic words "as is" when it came to the front lawn. Needless to say, we were now highly motivated to find a new place in Minnesota since we would be homeless in two months time. The housing market was a sellers' market there as well, with scheduled showings cancelled before places came on the market as some people were making offers on homes without actually seeing them in person. We were not those people, so we did go inside over a dozen townhomes and found one that was almost perfect and didn't disappear off the market before we put an offer in on it. When our offer was accepted, we were officially on our way to being "Minne-so-tan".

"...every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end..."

- from Closing Time, Semisonic, borrowed from Seneca

Next:

Minne-so-tan

Part II

Being There