A couple I worked with last year were house hunting the way most people do: thinking about the next two or three years. New job, growing kids, more space. But partway through our search, it hit them: her parents were starting to slow down, his mom had just mentioned wanting to be closer to family, and suddenly this wasn't just a "next home." It might need to be the home. The one that holds the next twenty years, not just the next few.

I'll admit something up front: I don't love the word "accessibility." It denotes disability, and most of the families I work with aren't shopping for a home because someone has a disability. They're shopping for a home that will still work for them in ten or twenty years, or one that already works for a parent navigating a season of life that asks a little more of a body than it used to.

Last spring, a friend of mine called me about her mother-in-law's house in Kirkwood. Nothing had happened. No fall, no diagnosis, no emergency. She just said, "I don't know exactly why, but something feels off every time we visit."

That feeling has a name. I call it the quiet stretch before the "oh crap moment," the slow window when a home starts working a little less well for the life being lived in it, long before anything dramatic forces the issue.