A Love Story: Sam & Rosemarie

 

“One of my friends had her own clothing store and when her model got ill, she asked me to model some business clothes at the Sheraton,” Rosemarie explains. “We went down afterward for dinner and Sam’s company was there for sales training. I was interested in him for my staffing firm and took his resume and that’s how we met. I never went out during the week. It was a Wednesday night. I’ll never forget that if I hadn’t helped my friend, I wouldn’t have met Sam. It was meant to be — it must have been since, God bless him, Sam drove back and forth from Pittsburgh to Reading for 18 months, just to see me. With a $6,000 phone bill, we decided we either had to get married or let it go. He proposed in June and we got married the following February on Valentine’s Day.”

 

When maintaining the couples’ three homes became too much for Sam’s back, the couple faced the difficult decision to give them up in favor of the maintenance-free lifestyle The Heritage offers.

 

“I put my foot down when I had to become the pool girl at our main house,” Rosemarie says.

 

“She was a very cute pool girl,” her husband of 42 years is quick to point out.

 

“The first year we were here, Sam was looking out the window, and all the leaves were coming down, and he was saying, ‘it’s so nice to see the leaves knowing that somebody else is taking care of it.’ The same with the snow.”

 

In addition to taking a break from chores, Sam also has access to onsite physical therapy to reduce the pain in his back and help him maintain his balance at The Heritage.

 

Though she’s fully retired, Rosemarie remains very active, bringing the same skills and savvy she used as a business owner to her role as President of the Residents Council and her work with the marketing committee. She still enjoys time in the pool, too, now playing water volleyball three times a week with her neighbors at The Heritage. “You laugh for two hours,” she says. “It’s great exercise, but you don’t think of it as exercise. They have a great fitness center here, too.”

 

One unexpected benefit of moving to The Heritage was the true sense of belonging and neighborly care. “We used to live in a home in a community where everyone had a few acres,” Rosemarie said. “You’d wave at the neighbors, but you didn’t really get to know them. They were nice, but there was no real connection. Six months after we moved into The Heritage, Sam’s blood pressure went through the roof. I called the nurse and she came in and called the ambulance and that night there must have been seven women who called me to ask me if I could if they could do anything for me. I would have never had that living at our old home. But that’s how everybody is here. You can count on them. I would think that that is the biggest selling point for The Heritage — the people who live here.”