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- Then
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- Now
At a small table tucked into Francks’Place, a popular spot for King’s Grant residents, sisters Sandra Coleman and Dawn Howe sip their water and nibble at bowls of soup and salad, their conversation slipping easily between memories and the latest updates from around campus.
For most of their adult lives, they lived far apart — Sandra in Baltimore, building a career at Johns Hopkins University, eventually becoming an assistant dean at the School of Public Health; Dawn moving from Pennsylvania to Arizona to Florida, following the military assignments of her husband and carving out her own career as a director of nursing services at a large retirement community.
“We hadn’t lived in the same state since our twenties,” Dawn said, still a little surprised at the math.
The separation might have continued indefinitely. But in 2004, three hurricanes swept across central Florida in rapid succession, damaging Dawn’s home in Lakeland. The storms made her rethink everything.
“I told my husband, ‘I’m moving,'” she said, laughing now.
Soon after, the two sisters — along with their husbands — began looking for a place that could offer security as they aged: a continuing care retirement community, known in the industry as a CCRC, or Life Plan Community. They toured options in Maryland, North Carolina, and even put down a deposit at a community in Charlottesville before reconsidering.
King’s Grant, nestled in the foothills of Martinsville, hadn’t been on their list. It felt too far south. But with a free morning during a visit to the area, they decided to stop by.
Almost immediately, something clicked. The staff, the sense of community, the feeling that they would not just live there — but belong.
“It just fit,” Sandra said.
They moved in 2005 (Dawn) and 2006 (Sandra), settling into separate cottages a short walk across campus from one another.
Today, Sandra and Dawn are fixtures of life at King’s Grant — organizing singalongs, volunteering in memory care, leading resident committees. Dawn, quick with a laugh, helps oversee the dining committee, among other roles. Sandra, equally active, keeps a busy schedule of gardening, travel and community events.
“We stay busy,” Sandra said, with a small shrug that suggests it’s never really been in question.
Their new lives are built less around big milestones than a series of steady, familiar pleasures: sister trips like last fall’s Columbia Snake River cruise, afternoons spent hosting friends for dinner, quiet mornings on the decks they added to their homes.
They live in separate houses, but in every way that matters, they are just across the street from each other.
It is easy, sitting with them, to forget how unusual their story is — two sisters who spent fifty years apart, now growing older together.
“I had to get to know her again,” Sandra said, smiling.
They have, in a way, chosen each other twice — once by birth, and again, by decision.
“We always loved each other,” Dawn said simply. “But now, we know each other.”
