My aging mother in law has had a lot of difficulty in the past few years with our Winters. He has lived alone for almost six years since my father-in-law passed and the cold and snow has started to take a toll on her both physically and emotionally. Many people in our area experience depression during The Long Winter months and with her being alone it has escalated the situation greatly. Fortunately, she has a brother who lives down in Florida and we all pitched in to send her on a vacation to see him. We wanted to give her a break from the cold and ice and planned for her to stay about a month down there. We arranged for someone to check on the house and even take care of her cat while she was awake but knew that she would miss being home as well. At least that’s what we thought when we put her on the plane but we were surprised when we received a call from her brother saying that she was thinking of moving down to his area. We never envisioned that she would want to make such a drastic move at her age but apparently the change in climate had really done a lot for her. She said that she no longer experienced the aches and pains of daily living because of the warmer temperatures and her overall attitude had improved greatly due to the sunshine. We knew we had to honor her wishes but my only concern was the fact that she really disliked living in an air-conditioned environment. She would never even allow us to put in a window air conditioner during the summer so I couldn’t imagine how she was going to live with it on a year-round basis.
