Skipping Town

In a few hours, we'll drive away from 25 Hickory. Some thoughts. *** In 2012, on the cusp of our move from Brooklyn to New Jersey, I wrote a heartbroken goodbye letter to New York City. It was the end of a chapter, a long, topsy turvy chapter that shaped me and set me on the path of the rest of my life. Though I’d left before, for a four-year stint in Barcelona and California, I knew I’d go back, and I did , baby Lucia in tow. Then Greta came along. That’s when the city I loved almost broke me: two under two, in a small apartment with no yard, was a calculation that didn’t work. So we packed up and moved to the burbs, in what has now become a cliched migration from Brooklyn to Maplewood, a place that realtors, unfortunately, relentlessly market as “Brooklyn West.” And we were happy. We found a fixer-upper on one of Maplewood’s most beautiful streets, a house that was not done in any way but had the soul and the space we were looking for. We were the only offer, and we made a low o

Today was as insane as you'd expect. Besides the expected packing of the car and POD, we also were surprised to learn that, before 4:30pm, we had to: Buy and install all new smoke detectors Buy and install two fire extinguishers Submit and pay for a Certificate of Continued Occupancy at the town hall Submit and pay for a fire safety compliance certificate at the fire department Get a form notarized before submitting to the fire department Photograph all newly installed smoke detectors and extinguishers, turn into a PDF doc, and email to...someone (Andrew did this) Wire the down payment More time-intensive and arduous than all this was draining, washing, and disassembling our inflatable pool setup. We set up two hoses to siphon out the water, but this was very very slow, so the kids got in the pool and stepped on the sides to drain it faster. Once the water was out, we had to pick up all the foam tiles that formed its platform. In the meantime, it was raining hard, so everything bec

The buyers' inspection was today, so in the morning we all loaded ourselves into the car and headed into the city for one last visit. It was our first time there since February (me and the girls) and March (Andrew), and we were glad to see so much normalcy--lots of traffic on the streets, people walking, sidewalk seating outside restaurants, shops open. We'd assumed parking would be easy; we were wrong. But we found a spot on Columbus and ate bagels on a bench outside the Natural History Museum. Then Andrew took Farrah into the park and the girls and I went into Flying Tiger for some notebooks and other things. Then we drove to the Muji near Bryant Park and bought, in all, 22 notebooks. (The Muji five-packs are my favorite, and we stocked up.)  We thought about having lunch in Bryant Park, but we couldn't find a place to park, so we just headed home. We drove past shuttered theaters. We talked about what we'd see when Broadway reopens. We decided, when we visit, we'

Departure week continues. More goodbyes with friends last night. Yesterday L&G played with the girls across the street, and today L&G had an all-day (masked) playdate with all the neighbor kids, running feral from yard to yard with a gang that ranged from first grade through fifth. They played games, ran around, swung, bought ice cream from the ice cream truck. They didn't come home until 7:00pm. It was exactly the kind of suburban summer day we imagined long ago. And, of course, we're leaving right when the kids can start playing together after the long spring. We should have FORBIDDEN them to play this week just so we could have had an easier departure. Alas. Today we got some surprising news: the girls will be going to school in-person on September 8 (Lucia) and September 10 (Greta), instead of the originally planned end of September. All the things I'd put off doing, thinking I had several weeks, I suddenly had to do--most crucially, order uniforms and masks. I

 At some point, we have to just lock up the POD, get in the car, and go. These days leading up to our departure are frenzied and also, on some level, unnecessary; we're paying for full-service moving, which is a lovely thing in theory, but I'm way too much of a control freak to simply leave the house as-is and let the movers pack it all up. There are things I want to pack up myself, things I want to have with me in the car, things I don't trust anyone to handle with enough care. I also like my boxes to make sense, for easier unpacking. So it turns out I've managed to pack up almost everything except our dishware, linens, small appliances, most of the books, and holiday decorations (which, actually, are already packed in bins, so...).  WARNING: This is the moment when there's a risk that I'll consider cancelling the full-service movers, because "I've packed almost everything already." Eight years ago, after doing a ton of packing, I did actually can

Yesterday continued the wave of goodbyes, with a neighbor-hosted gathering of all our wonderful friends on Hickory Drive. We lucked into this street eight years ago, and I fear no other street will ever compare. Good neighbors are no small thing. We spent many restless hours wondering, yet again, if this is all a Very Big Mistake. (Too late nooowwwwwww....) We spent today doing more prepartions: loading firewood into the POD (the moving company won't take firewood), doing more garage cleanout to build our trash pile, packing up a few more things to go into the POD. Very soon, everything is going to be in limbo. We'll take some things with us in our car; more things will join us a week later in the POD; the rest will come two weeks after that in the moving truck. It's a process. I'm trying to be calmly accepting of the fact that it'll be at least a month before I know where anything is, but I know I'll have a breakdown over this at some point, when I can't fi

It's real now. No turning back. We sold our house in one day, without it ever going on the market. This is a huge relief, and also a forcing factor because now we really can't change our minds. Ha! Not that we were going to! But now we really really can't. We're locked in. We're leaving. We're leaving in one week. The kids are now forced to face that reality too. Their friends are away on vacations or leaving for vacations, so yesterday involved a lot of goodbyes and a lot of hysterical tears. I felt yesterday like I'd ruined a lot of tween lives. It is not a good feeling. WHAT ARE WE DOING? Per the contract of our marriage (ie only one of us is allowed to freak out at a time), Andrew is calm and steady, reassuring me that this is not a mistake, that this is something we'd been talking about for a long time, that we're going to be happy and the kids will be happy, and also here's a spreadsheet with conditional formatting about all the great thing

Wow , you've probably been thinking the past couple of months. Those Littells are ON FIRE with cleaning out their house . And we have been! We've excavated every last space. Eight years of stuff. We were relentless. It's not easy for me to get rid of things but even I was ruthless, driven by quarantine to dive into this project and see it through. And yet. I haven’t been totally forthcoming on this blog. The thing is, even as we were cleaning in a kind of quarantine fit, as many people were, we were also having constant conversations addressing a single, urgent question: Is it time to move? Moving away from New Jersey, likely to Pittsburgh, was always the longish-term plan. There would be work hurdles, and school hurdles, and entrenched-in-familiar-routines hurdles, so it was never something we’d seriously considered. We knew we would consider it; we just didn’t know when. Sometimes we thought we’d start talking about it when Lucia was about to enter middle school, a point

Spent the day cleaning out the garage, the last frontier of our whole-house cleanout. Took another carload of stuff to the thrift store. The girls came too, and we even went inside the store to look for books. We found a cache of Sweet Valley Twins and bought them all. We got stuck in traffic on the way home, and the seven-minute drive took 45 minutes. Then I met with our dog sitter to touch base one last time before we leave for the beach on Saturday. Tired and annoyed that all I did today was clean, the kids argued over the SVT books all evening.

It's August. We're in NJ. Back to usual routines, and by "routines" I mean "staying in our house all day." The kids are back to swimming all day in the inflatable pool. They're still playing with their American Girls. Today, their collections of Shopkins and Cutie Cars came out. I love all these revivals. I love the little setups they create: at mealtimes, the little Shopkins girls join us at the table, sitting at their own little tables with tiny Shopkins foods. Last night they had a slumber party in Lucia's room. And this morning I saw them both just lying in their beds, reading together. I am LOATHE to give up these long free days. LOATHE. Of course I want a vaccine and an end to all this lockdown, fear-of-crowds madness. But there's so much of this lockdown that I...like. I like being home all day! We all do! We are not millions-of-activities people! I like Andrew home all day and never traveling for work. I like the kids home all day. All