Skipping Town

Today was our first official day of house hunting: it’s now March, and if we see a house we love, it’s within the realm of possibility that we could, and should, buy it, since we need to move out of our apartment by the end of July. We saw three houses today—and loved all three. Today may very well have been the beginning and the end of our search. We saw one in Maplewood, one in Glen Ridge, and one in Montclair. All three were enormous—six bedrooms, finished basements, large decks, decent yards, living room, extra living room, dining room, etc etc etc. Space! We can afford them all, more or less; we’ll only have to eat ramen noodles for about twelve to twenty-four months. One package a day. Split four ways. Anyhoo, the Maplewood house has fully captured our imagination. It’s on a gorgeous street, one of the town’s loveliest, and is just huge. Old and huge. It has all the charm and character we could ask for. The downside: it needs a LOT of work. A couple of things—like asbestos tiling...

We set off this morning for the last of our exploratory day trips. Our destination: more of Connecticut, and two of the River Towns. First up was Stamford, which we did not like. It’s a city, and had that stressful city feeling of too much traffic, too few sidewalks, no place to park at a storefront McDonald’s. And we really, really needed that storefront McDonald’s. After a run of several successful (i.e., no-motion-sickness) car trips, Lucia threw up pretty much as soon as we hit the Stamford city limits. And this was epic vomiting. It was everywhere. All over the carseat, all over her clothes, all over Cat and Elmo, some on her boots. It gushed down the neck of her sweater and around the back of her neck. It was horrific. And it was so cold outside, so the poor sweetie was shivering, her teeth chattering, as I changed her clothes in the trunk while Andrew cleaned up the carseat. I’d gotten lazy this trip. I’d still brought a change of clothes and a big box of wipes (we keep paper to...

We embarked on another exploration today. We’re coming to the end of these new-town investigations—there’s one more day trip we might do, but now we’ve seen all the options at least in passing and can start focusing in on our top choices. Today we drove north to Scarsdale, Chappaqua, White Plains, and Pleasantville. Scarsdale was pristine and lovely—like a magical fairytale hamlet—but those fairytale houses were so close together it was like someone had fitted them together into a puzzle. There were no yards to speak of with many of the properties, and everything was way out of our price range anyway. For some reason I’ve always associated Scarsdale with the kind of suburbia that would inspire Richard Yates—engendering a particular sort of existential despair rooted in disillusionment, isolation, burst dreams. I have no way of knowing whether this is accurate and suspect it is not. But with house prices in the $1 million+ arena, we probably won’t find out. There were some pretty proper...

We headed out to the burbs once again today, this time to drive around Montclair, New Jersey. And we really loved what we saw. We’d been to Montclair several months ago on a very preliminary exploration—it’s where we bought Lucia’s very first stuffed Elmo—but this time we were looking more specifically at houses. There are some beautiful, tree-lined streets, large, interesting houses, nice-sized yards, good parks, lots of places to walk to. The schools are, I’ve read, outstanding. We went to just one open house today but are definitely putting Montclair high on the list for future hunting. Once again the girls were great in the car. However, Lucia seems to have gotten it into her head that any time we get in the car, our destination is a playground. As soon as we get on the road, her chant begins: “Playground? I go a playground?” We did find a playground for her, since we had some time to kill before the open house; we stuffed her into her snowpants, hat, coat, and mittens in the back ...

Early this morning, the four of us set out in the car for more explorations of possible places to live. On the agenda today: Mamaroneck, Rye, and Port Chester, in New York; and Darien, Rowayton, and Cos Cob in Connecticut. The outstanding school districts in both areas are extremely appealing, the commute humane, the taxes much more palatable than New Jersey. We expected our trip today to shake up our top new-home choices. But despite our enthusiasm going in, we were surprised to find that we didn’t much like Mamaroneck. There were some beautiful homes, but it seemed remote—and, in an odd way, there was a malaise hovering over the town. I didn’t see a cozy suburban life there—I saw isolation. Perhaps the gloomy day had something to do with it, but neither of us could quite imagine ourselves being happy there. Same for Port Chester. We felt differently in Rye: a really cute downtown, beautiful homes. It seemed livelier somehow; and we could better imagine a home there. It became clear ...

It’s begun: our house hunt. After saving for the past four-plus years, we are ready to buy a house. Well, we’re ready to start the process of preparing to buy a house, with the goal of moving by the time our lease is up on August 1. That seems like a really long way away, but it’s not when you factor in six to eight weeks for closing. So it’s time to start the hunt. Today we drove out to Maplewood, NJ, a pretty town that’s surprisingly close to NYC—we got there in about half an hour, which means Andrew and I could conceivably come into the city to do fun things on nights when we have a sitter or visiting grandparents. The commute for Andrew is humane, and the community for me seems, from preliminary observations, very nice. We were anxious about making the drive with both kids, but they did great: no carsickness from Lucia, only minimal fussing from Greta, and a manageable amount of whining from Lucia that focused on her desire to go either home or to a playground. Both kids ended up a...

I made my first holiday-shopping trip to a mall yesterday, to the Galleria in Roseville. I’ve done almost all of my shopping in Japan and online, so I needed only a couple of things; and so I bit the bullet and drove out to Roseville in the late afternoon. It’s not far from Andrew’s office, so I picked him up first and we went together. I hadn’t been to the Galleria in months. The last time I was there was in the summer sometime, and it’s since gone through a mammoth expansion—a huge new complex has been added to the mall itself, and across the street from the mall is an outdoor “shopping and lifestyle center” (an outdoor mall) called The Fountains. I don’t particularly like either of these shopping options, but last night they seemed especially terrible. The Fountains has a few good shops—Anthropologie, Whole Foods, DSW—but the layout of the complex is so desolate, so off-the-map, that as I walked around I felt like I’d dropped off the edge of the earth. It didn’t help that almost no ...