Alexandria, VA – When asked my favorite place to vacation, I say home. There is no place I’d rather be.
According to Census.gov, from 2020 to 2024, the older population grew by 13.0%, significantly outpacing the 1.4% growth of working-age adults (ages 18 to 64), while the number of children declined by 1.7%.
I don’t want to move and I’m not alone. According to AARP, more than three-quarters of adults 50 and older want to stay in their homes or communities as they age.
That, and the growth in the elder population, have given rise to senior living communities and organizations such as At Home Alexandria (athomeinAlexandria.org) and Mount Vernon at Home (mountvernonathome.org) that help elders remain in their homes.
I see moving as a trajectory – you go, crustacean-like, from small to larger shells. We humans differ in that most of us wake up one day and want to reverse the process – to shed the large shell and all that stuff we no longer need.
I want to shed stuff but not this home. I loved this little three-bedroom rambler at first sight. “This is my house. I don’t want to see anything else,” I announced to the real estate agent at my first step through the door. I was smitten by the afternoon light that illuminated the dining and family room addition made by a previous owner.
My first move – by bus from Brooklyn, NY, to Washington, DC – was the longest in distance and it was big in other ways. I left home at a time when most girls didn’t leave home except to go to college or get married. I left home to leave home.
When I first came to DC, I lived briefly at several places – first at the Meridian Hill Hotel for Women, then in a rooming house, then to a furnished apartment in Southeast DC.
I married during my first year in DC and my crustacean-like shell grew to accommodate the four babies born to my husband and me.
My youngest daughter, Lynn, now contemplating a move from a large house in Stafford to a place yet to be found in Myrtle Beach, asked, “How did you do it – sell one house and find another, pack up all the stuff and find places to put it, mostly on your own?”
How? I was younger and stronger and I truly believed I could find a way do anything. Mostly, I could. And especially for the last move, the kids were old enough to help a lot.
I remember walking through valleys between mountains of packed cartons. Ever organized, the cartons were labeled on two sides with their contents and the room where it was going. Once in the new space, first thing I did was create islands of relative sanity – the kitchen and the bedrooms. Unpacking the other stuff was done little by little.
Deciding to move from the last house, a condo in Fairlington, to this house was hard. The mortgage there was almost paid and moving meant assuming debt. More than that, the Fairlington house was the first house I bought on my own. I was divorced then and the divorce decree legally changed my last name to Tisara, a name I made up, signifying to me that I was my own person. I had left my job with a national association while I lived there and started my own photography business. Two of the kids and I ran that business in rented space on upper King Street for almost 30 years until the building was sold and we had to move. Son Steven still runs Tisara Photography in another rented space on South Washington Street.
My family and I recently celebrated my 26th anniversary here. Twenty-six years of gathering friends and family for celebrations large and small in the accommodating dining and family rooms.
How glad I am that I decided to move here, and I plan to age in place as long as I possibly can.
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Mosaic artist-Photographer Nina Tisara is the founder of Living Legends of Alexandria.
