My Nan is finally moving out of home. At 98 my grandmother has decided it's time to "retire" and is moving into a retirement village.
I'm sure she'll put the other retirees to shame when she rolls up there today, ready to get down to business.
After more than 75 years of living in Wollongong, in the same house in Gwynneville, with the same next-door neighbours for most of that time, Nan is moving closer to my mother and myself.
She says she's doing it to stop us worrying about her, which is probably the truth because for the past 70 years, my Nan has pretty much looked after not just herself but anybody who turned up on her doorstep.
At 98 she still doesn't have a pair of glasses and keeps pestering her doctor to give her some sort of medication because she only takes one or two pills a day.
Nan has always been fiercely independent at a time when women were meant only to be good wives and mothers.
She arrived in Australia at age 13 on a ship from England and at 14 had to leave school so her older brother could continue his education and become a teacher.
She'd been a scholarship holder at a prestigious girls' grammar school in England at the time.
But it didn't mean Nan stopped learning.
Although she had only a year at Wollongong High School because the country went into depression, she got a job at an office and became a bookkeeper.
Even at 90 she was still doing the books for her church, all without the assistance of modern-day technology.
She has seen her own daughter and all her grandchildren go to university and said a few years ago she would have loved to have had the opportunity I had to go to university, where she said she would have done a business degree.
She married my grandfather and had my mother by the time she was in her mid-20s, and it was from the porch of the house in which she has lived in for the past 75 years that she waved him goodbye as he caught the train from North Wollongong station to go off to war.
It was one of the reasons she once said she was so reluctant to ever leave her house, because it was the last place she saw him.
As a young widow, she had to keep working to pay the mortgage and she used to delight in shocking us as young children when she'd recount her days going to the office on the back of a motorbike.
When her brother's wife died, Nan took in him and his own two young children, who she raised as her own.
She was in her 70s when I moved to Wollongong to live with her and even then she was running rings around me.
She'd walk each day into town, and a shopping trip to Sydney was a marathon sprint from one end of George St to the other trying to keep up.
At 80 she worked in my mother's bookshop, learned how to use a computer and charmed everyone who came through the door.
She's lived through two world wars, a great depression, numerous recessions, seen phones go from wind-up to dial-up to mobile, TV replace wireless, and music go from something heard on a gramophone to something downloaded into an iPod.
Last week marked the 70th anniversary of my grandfather's death, and in typical Nan style, she made a quiet mention of it in passing as she continued to pack away a lifetime of memories.
Today I'll be helping her unpack those memories in a new house, and hopefully it will be a place where my own kids will make a few more memories with her as we all did growing up.
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