One of the first questions people would ask us when we told them we were putting our house on the market was “Where are you moving to?”

My answer was always that we want to stay as much in town as possible because our youngest daughter, Jennifer, who is a very social sophomore at Petaluma High would never speak to us for the rest of our lives if we moved somewhere that meant she had to change schools.

Thinking about where we would move has been a theoretical exercise because selling house is such a protracted process. But the news from our lawyer is that there may be positive movement by the bank to approve the buyer’s offer in the next 10 days.  So we are hopeful that means that we have actually sold the house and consequently we need to get serious about finding a place to rent.

If it was only Steve and me who needed to find a place to live, we would have absolutely no problem living in a nice double-wide at one ofPetaluma’s senior mobile home parks. In fact, in the many years that we’ve been driving Meals-on-Wheels, we’ve had an opportunity to scope out all the various mobile home towns, villas, parks, woods, lakes, and estates and choose which one would be top of our list.

But the problem is that we still have a teenager still living with us. We even came up with a plan. Jennifer could wear her Halloween costume from a few years ago when she dressed-up as an old lady. And so she could pretend to be my mother every time she comes home. She just wouldn’t be able to ever invite any friends over for her remaining three years in high school. Can you believe it? She wouldn’t go along with the plan.

Since the mobile home park isn’t an option, it’s back to searching Craigslist and sorting it by “Petaluma” and “cats” and then “High to Low” prices so all the rentals with only one bathroom go to the bottom of the list. For Jennifer, sharing a bathroom with her parents is only slightly less horrible than changing schools.

What are my criteria for our new place? if I could, I would sort the list by “No yard,” “Freshly-painted,” “Wood floors,” and “Not depressing.”