Will you eventually leave your home town or stay there forever?

Both wife and I left our hometowns 50+ years ago and about 10 tears ago we gave considerable thought to retiring in or near one of our home towns, so we visited a lot and even looked for houses. At some point it hit us that we really no longer had a connection to what once was. Parents, friends, etc. were mostly deceased or had themselves left town, and what we really wanted more than anything was privacy and the time and space to piddle or just be. We had lots of hobbies and unfinished projects, and yet unfinished hopes and dreams and a major move would have sucked too much energy out of us with not very much of a payback.

One observation was that people we had maybe been close to 40 or 50 years ago aren't really the same people now, and in some cases there's a sense of intrusion when you bump into them 50 years later and try too hard to reconnect. The leap from 18 years old to 70 years old is a lifetime. I remember one of my close friend classmates who I saw again at a 50th reunion and I didn't even recognize him in appearance and neither in conversation.