Member-only story
Seniors on the move
Refusal to Acclimate
My grandfather’s move to Florida
If Harry, my grandfather, were younger, they probably wouldn’t have let him move out of Vermont in the first place. Not only was he a state policeman, guarding the Canada-United States border during Prohibition, he also served four terms as a state senator.
He was considered a Vermont state treasure!
His beloved wife Ethel, of 40 some years, had passed away. After a period of lonely years, he married a New York businesswoman named Ruth.
Ruth lived in a house she shared with two other women by the home in which I was raised in Oakhurst, New Jersey. She commuted by train to New York daily to work as an accountant..
My grandfather visited our family in New Jersey from time to time and it was on one of these visits he met Ruth.
If there ever was a time the old adage, “opposites attract” was apropos, this was it.
He was the consummate extrovert, perpetually positive. She was the serious intellect who’d rather read a book than be at a party with other people.
Naturally, as things often happen with people who have different temperaments, they married and moved to Vermont. She was past retirement age in her early 70s. My…
