We bought our house after seeing a classified ad in the newspaper, and I realize how quaint that is

We have been in our house for 21 years. That feels like a long time to me, but I know many people who have lived in their homes for 30 or 40 or more years.

In some cases I think these folks simply found their perfect houses and have stayed ever since. In other cases, I think it's reverse inertia at work: It's such a hassle to move that many simply choose never to do it again.

For us, it was a matter of finding a big enough home to hold our young family while staying within the comfortable confines of Wickliffe, Ohio, the city where my wife and I have lived our whole lives.

I was thinking back recently to when we were looking to move out of our first home on East 300th Street.  I remembered that Terry found our current house not on the Internet (though she could have), but rather through a classified ad in The News-Herald, our local daily newspaper.

An ad in a print newspaper. Talk about a different era.

This memory is timely because it was 36 years ago tomorrow (August 22, 1988) that I started working at The News-Herald as an 18-year-old sports agate clerk. I took game scores and stats over the phone and soon began writing articles with my byline on them, which was always a thrill.

More importantly, it was a time when The News-Herald and community newspapers in general played a much more prominent role in society than they do now. Most households had a subscription to at least one paper in the late 1980s, so I could always be sure that whatever I wrote would attract plenty of eyeballs.

Newspapers retained their position of influence for several years after that, at least as long as 2003 when the previous owners of our house, John & Lisa, saw fit to advertise in the classified ads.

Nowadays, of course, that simply wouldn't happen. Classified ads aren't really much of a thing anymore, and even if they were, no one would think to look there for a house anyway.

The comedian John Mulaney said, "I was once on the telephone with Blockbuster Video, which is a very old sentence."

I feel you, John. I can say in all honesty, "One time I bought a house that was advertised in a newspaper, which is a very, VERY old sentence."

We're middle-aged people, which means we need to figure out the downsizing thing

The AI Blog Post Image Generator did a decent job creating this image from the prompt "middle-aged people in a one-floor house." I've certainly seen it distort faces worse than this.

We recently helped my sister-in-law Chris move into a new home. Well, Terry far and away did the most work there. Jack and I just chipped in a few times each on carrying the heavy stuff.

The point is, Chris has new digs, and it's a house with no upstairs and no basement. Everything is on one floor with no steps to navigate.

This is a common move for those of us who are not yet old but who can see senior citizenhood somewhere on the distant horizon. You may be able to fly up and down stairs now, but what happens in, say, 15 years?

And what happens once most or all of your kids have flown the coop? Do you keep (or even need) a bigger home? Or do you move into something smaller and more manageable?

Terry and I are, for the foreseeable future, staying in the house where we raised our kids. We've been here 20 years and are working to remodel/spruce up the basement, kitchen, deck and various walls that desperately need painting.

Investing that kind of cash suggests you're going to stay somewhere for the long haul, and I suppose that's accurate in our case. We have no plans to move anytime soon.

Keeping the house relatively clean isn't an issue for us physically right now, and we can still do most of the yard work on our own. We do have a guy who cuts our grass and another who removes the snow from our driveway. But for the most part, we're OK maintaining the place ourselves.

Our house is something like 2,500 square feet with five bedrooms on a half-acre lot. There were many years when we needed every one of those bedrooms, but now we're able to use one as Terry's craft room, one as my office, and another as a nice guest room. I like that arrangement.

There will come a time, though, when we'll be better off in a house like the one Chris has rather than the one we have now, which includes both a sizeable basement and an upstairs.

That decision is probably two decades away, but it will come.

In the meantime, with four of the five kids gone, I kind of like living here and not having to tell someone to get their clothes off the stairs or their backpack off the floor.