This is part of an ongoing series about what the third chapter of life actually looks like in the Lakes Region, for the people who chose it.
The question usually arrives sideways, after we’ve already been debating what the escrow payment will be and whether to get inspections (always get the inspections!). Maybe they’re thinking of this as a second home, a family retreat for summers and ski weekends and Thanksgiving. Maybe they’re ready to leave Georgia, or Arizona, or California behind and settle somewhere green, between lakes and mountains. In any case, we’re usually standing in a kitchen with good light and a window over the sink, and one of them says, “It’s perfect. But will the kids actually come?”
I used to answer it with enthusiasm, which I now recognize was a bit of a mistake. The honest answer is that I don’t know. And that probably no one really does, because what we think we will do and what we actually do are often two different things entirely. What I do know is what I did.
I grew up in Nashville, TN, in a house I assumed would always be there and in a city that was very different then than the bachelorette party magnet it is now. When my parents retired, they sold the house I grew up in a mere 20 minutes from BNA International Airport and Music Row and the Bluebird Cafe and moved out to Spring Hill. Spring Hill was farmland and civil war battlegrounds and a Saturn manufacturing plant when I was a kid and is now a sprawl of subdivisions and shopping centers. They were happy. I was not unhappy for them. But I rarely went.
This is the part I’m not all that proud of. Spring Hill had nothing to draw me except my parents, and apparently that wasn’t quite enough to beat the logistics, even though I loved spending time with them. And I still saw them several times a year, in visits where we were both staying in a hotel and eating meals at restaurants my Dad and I would debate for weeks before and weeks after each visit. Manhattan. Boston. A few times in Maine or Vermont, where we could eat well and walk around and feel like people on a trip rather than people on an obligation. It worked for years. I think we all thought we were seeing each other plenty.
Then their health began to fail, and what had worked for so long didn’t really work anymore. I started going back, and the trips were what they were: a 90 minute drive to the airport, a flight to Nashville, a rental car, an hour of highway to a town where I knew no one and had nowhere to go when dinner with my parents was over and they wanted to go to bed. Duty visits, even with love behind them. Nobody had planned them as anything else.
I think about this every time someone asks me about whether their kids will visit them if they move here.
Because here is what I learned from the other side of that question. The place your parents choose has to do some of the work. I didn’t dread trips to Spring Hill out of lack of love. I stayed away because it asked me to give up a long weekend and offered nothing back. Adult children are busy, and they are choosing, whether they say so or not.
That doesn’t make the Lakes Region an easy yes. It makes it a more complicated question.
There’s a woman in my book club who is retired, and her daughter, who is my age, belongs to the club too. The daughter relocated here, works remotely, and moved into her mother’s house. I’ll admit I sort of raised my eyebrows and wondered how long that would last. It has been working for a few years now, as far as I can tell from the outside looking in, and what strikes me is that nobody planned it as a solution to the visiting problem. It simply stopped being a visit and became the chosen next chapter for both women.
Then there’s a client of mine who raised her family here. After her husband died, the house got quiet in a way she hadn’t prepared for. Her kids did come, but the visits were few and far between, and she started to wonder whether “occasionally” was going to be enough for the rest of her life. She decided it wasn’t. She sold, and she now lives just outside Boston, near her daughter’s family. I want to be clear that she did not fail at the Lakes Region and the Lakes Region didn’t fail her. She weighed a place she loved against people she loved, and she made a clear-eyed call. As it happens I ran into her on the boardwalk this August at Weirs Beach, daughter and her partner in tow. They were all having a ball in the arcade and planned to drive by their old house later, just to see what the new owners might have done to it.
And then there are the families for whom it simply works. My next-door neighbor, a gentleman of a certain age, has visitors four or five times a year, and he is entirely content with that rhythm. He plans for them, he looks forward to them, and when they leave, he has his own life to return to. Other families I know send their kids for the whole summer, and the grandparents’ house becomes the place where childhood escapades and ice cream for dinner and a first kiss on a pier as the moon rises happens.
Same lakes, same mountains, same drive from the same airports. Very different arithmetic.
I don’t think there’s a universal answer. The region has plenty going for it. It’s beautiful, there’s a lot to do, and three major airports sit about ninety minutes away. But all of that only matters if the particular logistics of your particular family can carry it. How far away are they, how often do they travel, and what do they actually want from a visit? Do they need a reason to come, or will you be the reason? Are you the kind of person who is fine with four visits a year, or the kind who will quietly count the days between them? And, most importantly, have you all talked about any of this?
Those are not questions a real estate agent should answer for you. But I think they’re worth asking out loud before you sign anything, and sometimes the answer is that the place you love is also the place you can’t make work. I’ve seen both happen.
If I’ve learned one thing from Spring Hill, it’s that people will come for a place more frequently than they’ll come out of duty. So if you do choose the Lakes, give them something to arrive to. Lakes & Peaks put together a short guide called A Local’s Guide to Arriving Like You Already Know, a town-by-town list of where to eat, what to see, and what’s worth doing. It’s a small thing, but a visit with a plan tends to feel like a vacation rather than an obligation. You can find it at lakesandpeaksprovisions.com.
Here’s to building a life the kids will want to be a part of.
🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes
