I remember the day perfectly… I had been feeling for a while that I was getting lonely and that perhaps it was time to stop being so independent, move back to Mexico and live closer to my children. One day, I voiced my feelings to my daughter. She said she understood and that we had to think about it. The next thing was I got a list of 34 Residences for the Elderly in Mexico in my email box. It was obvious that my daughter had done her research well in advance of my recently discovered need to be closer to family, my children and grandchildren. The “LIST” was like a bucket of cold water. I had been thinking of a nice apartment near where my daughter lived as an alternative to The Ocean Between Us arrangement that I had set up about 20 years previously when I moved to Spain with my second husband, my marriage to their father having come to an inglorious end some years previously. After all I had given them freedom and motherless peace of mind for over 20 years. That should make them grateful and happy that I wanted to come back ¿no?  Well… no. In answer to my idea that it was time to come home, I received a well-prepared list of “Residences” for senior citizens in and about Mexico City.

After I had gotten over the shock, convinced myself that it was a loving and intelligent thing to do and that I had to be grateful for all the investigative work my daughter had gone to preparing said list I was able to talk calmly to her and suggest that I make a trip to Mexico and she help me visit the ones I had marked on the two page list she had sent me. I can’t say she was ‘delighted’ because she went about the arrangements in a very calm and business-like manner as if she were no more than an executive secretary helping her boss find living quarters in Mexico City…. However, she was very efficient and by the time I arrived at her house she had made up a long list of possibilities, arranged for visits to at least 10 of them and set up a schedule that would have put at ease the most demanding airline pilot.

We began our visits to the residences that were within Mexico City and, naturally, with one that was very close to her house. This turned out to be a single (either never-married, widowed or divorced) woman living in a three bedroom, two story house with a small gardens in back and a front terrace for parking two cars that was unoccupied except for a bicycle. When we entered we found the darkened living room occupied by two elderly men sitting on ssa rather dilapidated sofa in front of a black and white television set playing an ancient cowboy film. The gentlemen were not introduced, nor did they look up from their outdated entertainment. We were shown around the house, the kitchen (small but neat), the dining room (dark and gloomy), the stairs steep, and above two bedrooms, each with five single beds separated by three night-tables much as the arrangement of a dorm in a boarding school might have been. The rooms were small but neat, the bed dressing plain but seemed clean, and the lack of space for anything else made up for by our hostesses animated chatter which I stopped listening to the moment I saw the bedrooms.

Of all the residences we visited, this was the most depressing and inadequate.

Over the ten days I stayed during that time, we saw several more possibilities -one in a high-rise connected by a passageway (two floors above the street) to one of the best hospitals in the City-, another also in a high-rise right next to one of the new and splendid shopping centers American-style (something I abhore). Then we went to the south of the city and saw a very attractive residence, built and furnished with certain elegance, and with lovely terraces and a generous amount of garden for a cosmopolitan city, and I got hopefull. Perhaps we would find something I really liked. It was after that we went to Cuernavaca, a small city some 40 minutes by super highway south of Mexico City and in the general direction of Acapulco and I was introduced to Eden… as in The Garden of… From the moment we entered the gates, there was no doubt in my mind that if I was to be locked up anywhere it was there.The whole layout was like an oldstyle Hacienda, with well kept lawns, fruit trees (the papayas hung by the dozen on one small example), mangos dropped full with richness to the ground to be harvested; lemon, orange and grapefruit trees offered up their budding produce to the greedy eye).

The buildings, judging from the style, probably were made over from an old Hacienda that had been extended to house a generous amount of oldies, and the general quarters-such as the dining room and terrace- were neatly furnished and had a cozy rather than institutional ambience. There was an unpretentious chapel which I doubted I would ever visit, but who knows…

The building housing the bedrooms had the feel of a spacious city hotel, and the rooms were light and airy, with small terraces and some even with a 2×2 space of grass they called a “little garden”. I liked it and the people who showed us around from the start. The climate of Cuernavaca immediately seemed the best for my olding bones and the gardens were a delight and perfect for my little dog whom I certainly planned to have with me. When we walked into one of the rooms that had a small terrace attached, there was a squirrel at the door looking in at us that promptly scuttled away, I was sold… This is it I told my daughter without even a hint of doubt.

So that is where I am headed, now that I have almost finished packing up everything in my Madrid apartment in preparation for its trans-oceanic journey. In less than a month I should be settled into the Garden of Eden -as I call it- and making friends with all the inmates with whom I will share my last years. Strangely enough, I can’t wait.