Goodbye, Maplewood

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 one. That was the start of our love affair with beautiful ruins; but we had the time. Over the past eight years we’ve done so much: kitchen, bathrooms, mudroom addition, basement renovation, siding removal, house painting, patio addition, landscaping, driveway paving, first-floor AC, built-in bookcases, new windows. We love, love, love this house.

I remember days spent playing on the front porch when the kids were toddlers. I made a Pinterest-y bin of rainbow rice and tucked in teacups and cat figurines. We had a garish plastic easel. We had a stack of “porch books” to read together. Inside the house, there were princess Barbies and My Little Ponies and Elsa and Anna dolls. The early years in this house were long and exhausting, but the kids were tiny and adorable, and this is the place where they were babies. The house held us well.

While living in this house, I published both my novels. One of them, I wrote here. The house nurtured that along, too.

We found a magnificent preschool, loved our friends and neighbors, and participated in traditions: Supper Club, Crab Fest, the Progressive Dinner. Maplewood is where we put both kids on a school bus for the first time, Andrew weeping on the corner as the bus pulled away. The kids and I spent nearly every summer day at the town pool, and here more than anywhere I could track the progress of my parenting: in the early years, I had to be at their sides in the water to keep them from drowning; later, they had little puddle jumpers that made it okay for me to maybe sit on the side of the pool; then there were no puddle jumpers, but they couldn’t go in the big pool without me; and then, like a flash, I was reading in a deck chair for hours while the girls swam alone, going down the waterslides and jumping off the diving board, and I could look up occasionally and think, Hmmm, where are the kids? It was impossible to imagine being the reading-in-a-deck-chair mom while I was the actively-keeping-the-babies-from-drowning mom, yet there I finally was.

This year, instead of serving as a reliable home base, our house was our refuge during the pandemic, the place we didn’t leave. We were grateful every day for it. We loved being here. We loved staying home. We are not a family that gets cabin fever. We relished the space and the yard and the safety.

And yet the pandemic is what’s spurring us to move now, and it’s time to say goodbye. The sadness I feel about selling this house is intense. It sold in one day, before it even went on the market, to a young couple who will surely undertake all the renovations we never got around to doing. But the house will continue to nurture all of us long into the future, because that’s the magic of real estate, if the timing is very lucky, as it was for us--buy low, sell high, and, above all else, location, location, location.

So goodbye, beloved house, 25 Hickory Drive. But that’s not the only goodbye this post needs to address. Here’s the thing I’m realizing as I write: though I’m leaving New Jersey, what this move also feels like for me is leaving the last vestiges of my New York life. A life that began with my move to the city in 1999. We chose Maplewood primarily for its proximity to New York, because Andrew needed to commute in every day. For a few years, he did, and that was pretty much the extent of our city involvement.

But that changed when the kids got a bit older, and suddenly we got a second round of city adventures. We started going in for a day, and then overnight. The city was our neighbor. We all loved it. We had our favorite place to stay, our favorite places to eat, our favorite shops, our favorite rooms at the Met. Andrew frequently tried to convince me to move back, pointing out that things would be different this time, that we could have more space and a (small) yard. We thought maybe we shouldn’t have left; if we could have just gotten through a few hard years of early childhood, we could have been a New York family, with New York kids.

That wasn’t the path we took. We left, but moving to this part of New Jersey was a way of hanging on; even when we couldn’t live in the city, we wanted to be near it. We didn’t want to let go, and we didn’t have to. We moved away, but the city was never out of reach.

Leaving New Jersey for Pittsburgh is the true and final end of my New York chapter. So goodbye to all that. (Ha! Just kidding. I don’t think appropriating that title is legal when the move is from suburban New Jersey to Pittsburgh.) But seriously--even though it’s a Jersey zip code we’re leaving, this feels like another New York goodbye. Goodbye to all of it, the city of my twenties and the city of my thirties and all the many starts and stops and entrances and exits, the city in the distance from the top of the South Mountain Reservation and the city just outside the hotel window where the kids are getting ready to head out for ramen and Wicked, the city that we yearned for while we lived on the other coast, the city that wasn’t worth it as I pushed one kid in a stroller and wore one on my chest and balanced grocery bags on both shoulders in Brooklyn, the city where we celebrated the kids’ birthdays and spent the college funds at the American Girl store, the city that gave me Andrew and was the springboard for my entire life.

Now we’re making a deliberate choice about where to live out the next chapter. Moving to Pennsylvania isn’t just some loose, random whim. We want to be near family. I want to live in a place where I feel a through-line in my life.

We’ll visit New York, of course, staying in a hotel like any other tourist, but the trips will have to be adequately planned in advance; no more driving in for the day. I hope the kids remember all the fun we had, how much they loved walking the city streets. I hope they maintain a feeling of connection, and that they’ll maybe live there themselves one day.

And I hope they remember their time in Maplewood, this house that held them as babies and was the backdrop to the early years. Though Andrew and I will briefly return in a few weeks to oversee the movers, today is the last time the kids will be at the house. I remember when we saw this house for the first time, with our realtor, both kids with us because we were a young family that always traveled as an unwieldy unit. They were eight months and two and a half. Andrew had the kids inside and I walked around the side of the house, down the unpaved driveway and past the overgrown rhododendrons, and I had a clear-as-day vision of the girls running through the branches, exploring the many brambly corners of the yard. I could see them there, like ghosts of their future selves. I knew without a doubt it was meant to be our house.

It’s hard to leave it all behind. Some mornings I wake up in a panic, certain that the idea of this gigantic change should never have left the realm of idle lockdown musings. Then, just as quickly, I’ll be filled with conviction that this is right. Maybe this move is both, all, at once--a mistake and a revelation, a detour and the right next exit, a step backward and a step forward, an open door and one that’s closing, a homecoming and a separation, an error and a gift.

There’s no turning back now. See you on the other side.