Our Stories, The Birches at Saugerties Blog
Resident Profile: Emanuela Mauro
Though she’s originally from Brooklyn, Emanuela Mauro (Ela to her friends), made her way up to Saugerties back in the early 1950s, when she moved with her husband, Mike, back to his hometown.
“Mike was born right here in Glasco. So I moved up here with him and my two children at the time. And that was ’50 or ’51,” she says. “Then we built a home right here on Route 32 outside of Glasco.”
After raising her kids and retiring from a job in sales, Emanuela and Mike moved to Florida, where they lived for the next 20 or so years. But when her husband passed away from a stroke in 2000, Emanuela knew that it was time to come home.
“My kids are here, so if something happened to me, I didn’t want them worrying, like they did when my husband had his stroke,” she says. “They had to jump on a plane and out they came. I had to consider them too, so I came back.
“So, here I be, like they say.”
After living in an apartment building on Simmons Street in Saugerties, Emanuela decided that she was tired of the landlord’s lax attitude toward taking care of problems.
“I heard of The Birches at Saugerties apartments being built at one of our senior meetings in the Town of Saugerties. I think Steve [Aaron] had come in and spoke to us, to the elderly people, about wanting to put up a place… I put my application in, and I was eligible. I didn’t know if I was eligible or not, never having applied for any kind of help.”
Part of what makes living in The Birches at Saugerties good for Emanuela is that she can afford it on her fixed income. “We didn’t get a raise in social security, so we don’t have any extra income,” she says.
Fortunately, there are amenities in place at The Birches at Saugerties — like Senior Advocate Alice Tipp — that help residents like Emanuela live well without breaking the bank.
“Living here, we found out that the [Ulster County] Office for the Aging offers a lot of different help we can get,” she says. “I didn’t know that when I lived in my other place. Here, Alice will tell us different things. At the end of this month, they’re going to give us a $20 booklet towards produce at the local Farmers’ Market. That’s fresh vegetables we get to have. Lots of different things like that that we wouldn’t know about if we weren’t here.”