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Health & Fitness

Farewell After a Third of a Century

After a third of a century we are relocating from Chelmsford.  

We moved here right after Proposition 2 and one-half passed.  It was a time of a Chevy dealership on 110 where the laundry and jewelry store stand across from Papa Gino’s, having to wait for ducks to cross Concord Road near Camp Paul and no traffic lights.  (Once you knew what to do it was easier to traverse the Center and Drum Hill than now with lights.)

When we moved here the our neighborhood had many pre-school and grade school kids, including our own.  The kids playing with Cabbage Patch dolls now teach kids in the local schools and have real kids of their own.  From being some of the younger people in the neighborhood we went to being some of the oldest.  However, the cycle repeats itself with the newer, and younger families moving in having pre-schoolers and grade school kids.

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Chelmsford was perfect for my stage of life.  It is a great place to raise kids and has a fine school system.  Both my kids went to out of state colleges, one in New York and one in Missouri and had no troubles keeping up and exceeding.  They are now successful professionals in their respective fields.

Chelmsford also has a great location: accessible to Boston, Cambridge, Maine, the Cape and of course tax free New Hampshire.  Town services are adequate and improved, including the library and new police station and forthcoming fire station.  Chelmsford is also a great place to live if you have a high tech related job, and robust as there are new firms that replace the old standards like Wang and DEC.

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I can’t speak to what it would be like to live in Chelmsford if you are single and looking for a night life.  The main night life I see, if any, is the ability to get a Duncan Doughnuts ice coffee 24/7.  I’m sure, due to my life-style, I missed a lot.

I’ll miss some of the challenges of Chelmsford: leaf raking (people say it’s so pretty in the Fall, but they don’t have to rake), loss of power in snow and ice storms (have batteries and a small propane camping stove), ski slalom like driving in the Spring to avoid pot holes (are we the pot hole capital of Massachusetts?), a Duncan Doughnuts every 500 feet and a CVS every 1000 feet.

I doubt if where we are moving there will be anything like the Common on July 3rd, the ice cream at Sully’s, one party local politics and the local architecture as backgrounds on the Simpsons.

Time to start the new adventure, with a part of Chelmsford always a part of me.

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