Robert Frost and Our New Home

In Robert Frost’s The Death of the Hired Man a farmer and his wife are surprised by the arrival of a man who worked for them on their farm many years ago. He’s old and tired now, no longer fit to help with the chores. When his wife suggests, “He has come home to die,” her husband scoffs, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” She replaces his definition with one of her own. “I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Those lines from Frost’s poem echoed in my mind when Karen and I moved here to the Chateau Lake San Marcos, only five miles from our Carlsbad front door. We loved our LaCosta condo, with its sweeping view of the mountains. For several years we toyed with aging in place. The uncertainties, both financial and emotional, of selling our home of fifteen years and moving to a new place to call home, were daunting. During our 34 years together, we've changed homes six times, across three states. Seven did not sound like a lucky number.  

But a couple of unplanned visits within a year to Palomar Medical Center’s emergency room, together with a dwindling social life in retirement, changed our minds. We had reached the age when good health and good friends can no longer be taken for granted.

We began looking for a new home, where we could find the security we needed to address our chronic health issues, as well as a community of our peers, seeking the same creature comforts. We found all of that here at the Chateau.

  

Unlike Frost’s farmer’s definition, even though we felt we had to move somewhere, we didn’t move to this place because we had to, nor did this place have to take us in. But it has become for us an unexpected gift, in Frost’s wife’s words, we “somehow hadn’t to deserve.”

It’s become our new home.