Small. Smaller. Smallest.

There comes a moment in life past the half-century mark that is hard to predict, but you know intuitively when it has occurred. It’s a flash of recognition, the instant you realize it’s time for a change.

It’s the day you put your youngest child on the plane for college. The day you sign your divorce decree, or your beloved family dog dies, or your spouse has open-heart surgery, or the company that’s employed you for decades gets sold to a competitor and your job is handed to a 25-year-old. Such a day is usually bittersweet, yet can be strangely full of promise.

For me, there was absolutely no missing the moment.

A few days after I’d received the second renewal notice for my AARP card, the telephone rang. On the line was my boss at the radio station where I’d served some 17 years as the health and lifestyle commentator on a highly rated morning drive-time show. There’d been a budget meeting, the big boss reported. He figured he could hire three Cijis for the price of me, so he wouldn’t be renewing my contract. As of that phone call, I was off the air.

I started to laugh. My yearly salary wouldn’t buy a fully loaded SUV. But before I could respond, Mr. Big advised me solemnly not to take this change in the show’s direction personally, and then hung up.

I relate this tale more than a decade later not as a whine-fest, but to emphasize that you never know what’s around the corner. As fate would have it, at the precise moment I was getting unceremoniously canned, my husband was on line 2 talking to a recruiter about a new and quite fabulous job opportunity. This subsequently led to a chance to become one of the oldest dot-comers in Silicon Valley during the Internet revolution, serving as an “adult supervisor” for packs of whiz kids forging the Web-based New Economy.

So we headed for Northern California--me licking my wounds while trying to turn my part-time novel-writing career into a full-time gig, and my husband, Tony Cook, a former magazine journalist, assuming the corporate role of managing editor and publisher of Intuit’s Quicken.com.

We were by then in our mid-50s and embarking on what we now look back on fondly as “Mr. and Mrs. Toad’s Wild Ride.”

we had lived for 22 years in the same Spanish-Revival house in Beverly Hills with the same phone number, the same low property tax rate and the same neighbors we didn’t know before trading it for a Victorian with a guest house in Santa Barbara. Now we were plunged into the extreme housing shortage and real-estate frenzy of the booming Bay Area, a situation that would prompt six more moves in as many years.

There was the purchase of a low-ceilinged, ridiculously priced, 950-square-foot condo we quickly hated and sold four months later because of a neighbor who refused to take his meds, dressed head to toe in cat-burglar attire, toted a legally registered gun and “arrested” people in the building’s underground garage for “stealing” their own cars.

Welcome to San Francisco.

Our next address was an improvement: a one-bedroom apartment on fashionable Nob Hill. What wasn’t so glam was its proximity to the neighborhood cable car barn, which prompted me to wear earplugs to ward off the incessant bell-ringing that could drive a writer ‘round the bend.

Yet another of our housing adventures involved renting a charming Victorian duplex in pricey Marin County that we soon discovered had a creek running underneath whose waters bubbled very, very loudly--and for days--after a good rain.

If none of this was enough to convince us that the moving gods weren’t smiling, there was that raw Saturday morning in March when we stood shivering on the loading dock at a storage company in San Jose, determined finally to sort through everything we had put on ice during these years of barely controlled domestic chaos.

We watched a forklift operator line up five 10-foot-square wood containers filled to overflowing with the accumulated goods of 25 years of marriage. Not only were there the usual outsized family “heirlooms,” along with four couches, two terminally ill vacuum cleaners, wicker porch furniture that seated 10 and a soup pot that could hold seafood gumbo for 40, there were also rafts of decaying photo albums, cartons of books stacked 10 feet high, 26 boxes of my 5,000-plus radio scripts, not to mention voluminous files of research materials for stories Tony had churned out over the years for Forbes, Money, Life, GQ and the late, lamented New West magazine.

The first object to emerge from the first open container was a child-size rocking chair with a petit-point seat cover that I had crafted for our son during my only pregnancy decades earlier. My adored husband picked up the little chair and swiftly consigned it to a pile next to a sign we’d scrawled that read: “Throw Away.”

I erupted in loud wails and displayed a sudden urge to kill. How dare my husband casually toss this treasure into the trash! How had it come to this? Why had we abandoned 4,000 square feet of living space for less-than-commodious executive digs, stashing most of our worldly goods in off-site storage paid for by “the company”?

This entire upheaval was suddenly too painful. True, our only child was now grown and self-supporting; our cherished English setter had died before we exited L.A.; and a number of our close friends had moved to the beach or far away. But what in God’s name had made us think it was a good idea to decamp to a city where we knew practically no one and jettison a lifetime of household possessions that suddenly seemed more precious than stock options?

My sense of bereavement over our domestic downsizing was visceral. “Is this the way I’ll feel when they cart us off to the nursing home?” I lamented to no one in particular on that frigid loading dock. After all, we had already culled our personal treasures not once, but in four angst-ridden sessions. Each year we received fewer Christmas cards from people who felt we’d “abandoned” our friendships. We often walked into parties where we knew no one but the host, and no one knew us or paid us the slightest bit of attention--wounds and adjustments both small and sizable.

Then it hit me. My emotional reaction probably paralleled the feelings that everyone “of a certain age” must confront eventually. We were only in our mid-50s, but the fact was that our needs had changed; they’d become simpler. As a practical matter, we couldn’t carry all this baggage into the next chapter of our lives. Nor, in truth, did we really want to. Even so, I became exhausted just looking at the clutter and dreaded the notion of culling it again. And what about our memories chronicled in those photo albums and file boxes? What about my jumbo gumbo pot?

i began pondering the fact that our transition, culling and consolidation were really part of the “new normal.” Witness the financial and emotional dislocation so many middle-class Americans face as companies merge, purge and outsource. Consider the waves of early retirees who seek to cocoon themselves in 2B, 2BA “active adult communities” or become part of the graying of the Florida peninsula, the Carolinas and the Nevada desert. Consider the flourishing self-storage industry. Something was up.

Looking ahead at the wave of some 78 million boomers--the first of whom hit 60 this year--I saw that my war-baby husband and I were living witnesses to their future. Our experience began to serve as an early-warning system for our younger friends. What we discovered--and what they all wanted to learn about--was how the painful process of paring down slowly shifted into something positive, at times even joyful.

As we deep-sixed worn croquet mallets, rusted weed-whackers, magazine back issues and untold objects that no longer had meaning or use in our current lives, we began to feel lighter, freer. With each item sold or given away, with every trip to Goodwill or the dump, we were liberating ourselves from an outmoded way of living that had been weighing us down in more ways than mere bulk.

It was a year or so after I’d wept at the sight of my grown son’s little rocking chair that I realized my husband and I had taken a course of action I ultimately dubbed “rightsizing.” Not merely “downsizing” to fit into a smaller living space, but taking positive steps to create a home filled only with what we love, and what suits our stage in life to a T. Rightsizing our lives had more to do with the “right” than the “size”--it involved not just the square footage of our living quarters, but an approach to all aspects of living, the opportunity to get it right, once and for all. And in the course of those six moves, we discovered that we didn’t just want smaller, we wanted better.

In this journey, we moved away from the idea that “we are what we have.” We examined such superficial judgments and learned to celebrate our lives through thoughtful selection of the environment, possessions and people that resonate for us. The turmoil of all those moves also prompted us to consider the emotional and practical aspects of accepting that we were, indeed, growing older, that our needs would continue to change, thereby requiring us to make changes in our way of life.

After trial, error and a soupcon of terror (we heard that our former cat burglar neighbor is popping the right pills these days), we finally found the perfect place for the foreseeable future: 1,375 square feet of scenic bliss, with the San Francisco Bay serving as our frontyard (no lawn to mow). We own one couch and a sofa bed for guests. We have a new, economy-sized dog--a jaunty little Cavalier King Charles spaniel. We drive a “baby” SUV that gets close to 30 miles to the gallon. I write on a laptop, having junked my desktop computer and all that entailed. I unloaded a lot of non-original art and kept only the books I’ll reread someday. I asked Tony to toss my 26 cartons of radio scripts into the dumpster a few years ago, and I did the same for his files. Those chapters are finished and new ones begun.

As for my son’s rocking chair? It is currently on “temporary-permanent loan” to my 5-year-old godchild in Sacramento, returnable if my son has children someday.