After moving out of Sherborn I rented a room a few blocks from the Shell station in Weston, from an older woman whose husband had been an airline executive. He had died before they could realize the house they had planned together, and she had used his life insurance money to build it herself — for both of them, in his memory. It was a remarkable house. My room was lined with built-in storage and cedar closets. She had added a large living room with a fireplace, a 2-car garage with a loft, and converted the cellar into a complete separate living area. All the equipment and furniture were of the highest quality. It was a genuinely wonderful place to live.

She was elderly and working in a school cafeteria to make a little money, but she had spent everything on the house and was struggling to make ends meet. She rented another room to a college student as well. Her son was a financial adviser but rarely visited — his father had died of a heart attack in the house and he could not be comfortable there. She managed to cover her day-to-day expenses, but when the property tax came due — around $3,000 at that time — she did not have it. For a couple of years the local church paid her taxes, but while I was living there the church told her they could no longer do that. Her son advised her to sell. She asked me to buy the house. The arrangement she proposed was that I would purchase it and allow her to continue living in the downstairs apartment, which was fully equipped as a separate unit. I did not have the money. I would have helped her if I could. She sold the house at a very low price, and her son used the proceeds to buy her a townhouse in Acton. I heard a couple of years later that she had died. I have always thought that leaving that house most likely broke her heart — it was not just a house, it was everything she and her husband had planned together and everything she had built in his memory.

That experience stayed with me. I have always felt since then that communities should exempt elderly people from property taxes on the homes they live in when they can no longer afford to pay them.

After she sold I moved to a nice apartment complex in Framingham on Route 9.