Leaving Home at 83
Sandra Butler
Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2024, 178 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Martha Miller

In this memoir, after a series of illnesses, Sandra Butler decides to leave home after fifty years and move to Phoenix to a residential home for seniors called Desert Manor, where she longs to have the details of her life taken care of. This is a funny but honest account of her adjustment period, where her desires are lined up against reality. For example, she wants to eat prepared meals in the dining room with other lodgers. But it doesn’t work out. She learns that the food isn’t that good, and the tables have assigned seats. She doesn’t fit in and is told as much, so she ends up buying food and eating in her apartment alone. One of her reasons for moving to Phoenix is that she will be close to her daughters. That doesn’t work out the way she thinks it will, either. She seldom sees her children.

Butler thought, “We have to have our paradise while we’re alive” (117) and hoped that Desert Manor would be one step toward it. However, she’d only seen pictures of her apartment before she moved, although she was offered a tour. When she enters the apartment, she finds pigeons have taken over her balcony. Then, when she has cleaned it, she has to block off the birds’ return with plastic wrap. So, there’s no sitting out there and enjoying the desert views.

Butler considers herself a lesbian activist, and even though she tries to be as open as possible, she doesn’t find a single person like her. Unexpectedly, she finds her way to the hearts of other residents through her Judaism. She asks residents about themselves and eventually wins them over as they tell their stories. It is only in the end, when she gets to talk about herself, that she can say she’s made some friends. Each friend she makes, she must do so by accepting their quirky personalities. She learns to live in an environment that she originally wanted to change. And in the end, she becomes satisfied with it.

At Desert Manor, Butler must confront her age more than ever. At one point, an Avon Lady comes, and she buys a bunch of makeup that renders her smooth and unidentifiable. Before the makeup, “My hair was thinning, my hips were thickening, my eyes were dimming, and my teeth appeared to be shifting. There was no cute part left anywhere on my body” (70). She quickly washes the stuff off her face and puts it away forever. She finds that she prefers the wrinkles and brown spots she’s developed over the years. “The primary identity here [Desert Manor] was old. Everything. . . collapsed into that” (113).

Along with the other residents, Butler feels sad that there’s no longer anyone who knows her history. One night at a dance, she discovers she can no longer dance through a whole record and determines to dance on her feet as long as she can and then dance from her seat. Accepting this, she says, “When I moved to Phoenix, I’d longed to have the details of my life taken care of, which they weren’t” (138), but she develops attainable new desires.

This is a well-written, humorous book. We find that while Butler must work to adjust to things at Desert Manor, she becomes friends with most residents, and they adjust to her. She is the leader of more than one Jewish group and works to include other residents. Meetings that were four or five people became more than thirty. We learn, as Butler learns, that she is more than a lesbian activist.

I felt the book started slowly while detailing her illnesses, but it was worth continuing. When she moved to her new home, the conflicts were interesting and often amusing. I wondered if young people would enjoy this book. There is no wild sex or walks on the beach. But I certainly enjoyed this short 178 pages, where I found truths about aging, things that I identified with, and things that had me worried. I am a few years short of 83, but suddenly that age doesn’t seem so scary to me.

Martha Miller is a retired English professor and a Midwestern writer whose books include fiction, creative nonfiction, anthologies, and mysteries. Her nine books were published by traditional, but small, women’s presses. She’s published several reviews, articles, and short stories and won several academic and literary awards. For more detailed information, her website is https://www.marthamiller.net/. Her Wikipedia page is here. She lives in ‘The Land of Lincoln’ with her wife, two unruly dogs, and two spoiled and sleepy cats.