From the Editor’s Desk: 6

Six years ago this coming month, my wife, daughter Kelly, and I drove up to Stowe, Vermont for a few days off that changed our lives forever. Kelly and her friends were what I can only call Zillow enthusiasts for whatever reasons teenage girls do anything, and she had been pestering us to move. Which is a strange thing for a normal, healthy kid with good friends, plenty of activities, and an excellent school record to even ask about. But whatever: with over three hours to kill in the car, I figured we would debate it to death and that my wife and I could explain exactly why we weren’t moving.

That’s not what happened, and by the time we arrived in Stowe, we had talked ourselves into moving. The reasons were many, but we had intended to downsize once the kids were out of the house anyway, and if we did this several years earlier than expected, we would save a lot of money. And to be honest, I was itching to prove that we could do this thing. So often, you have ideas about, or even make plans for, some future. And then never make it happen when the time comes because it’s so much easier to do nothing.

We were originally talking about looking into Maryland, Delaware, or Virginia and had only the vaguest of ideas about how or when we could make that happen in just a few months—before Kelly had to start a new school year—and between my normal work travel, which was always heavy each Spring before the pandemic. And then something else unexpected happened: my oldest sister called to see whether it was possible for us to come to Pennsylvania for a surprise birthday party for another sister. We had been visiting that area for decades, and vice versa, with my sister coming to the Boston area with her kids each year, and so this wasn’t an unusual request. But it was good timing, too: we could just drive straight there from Vermont and then go home from there.

We stayed at my sister’s house, I noted how Spring was so much more advanced there than it was at home, and we mentioned our rough plans about moving. We learned that my sisters’ mother, who we’ve always been close with, was finally moving out of her huge house and into a small nearby condo. And we attended the birthday party, which was nice, and then started driving home. All before it suddenly dawned on me, literally as we started driving, that maybe we could buy my sisters’ mother’s home. Which we had stayed in many times when the kids were smaller. And which I had never thought about twice.

It happened quickly. We drove by the house before leaving the area, found out how much it would cost, and realized that this was the only way we could possibly move that year. And so we did it: a financial downsizing but a house upsizing—it’s almost exactly twice as big as our previous home—and we were on our way. Our house near Boston sold for tens of thousands over asking, we somehow still did our normal July home swap (Sweden that year), which was previously booked, and we moved into our new home in Pennsylvania in August.

And now it’s been almost exactly six years since we made that decision. And not for the first time, I wonder where all the time went. I think I observed before that we’ve lived in this home now for longer than any home after the previous one, about 5.5 years vs. 15 years. My daughter completed high school here but she never had a proper graduation let alone a prom because of the 2020 pandemic. We’ve made friends here, which is nice, but a complication for any moves we may want to make in the future. (At least one of my friends back in Boston still continually guilts me about moving from there.) And we’ve become even closer with my oldest sister and her husband, which has been nice.

We also uncharacteristically bought that apartment in Mexico in what can only be described as a post-pandemic wake-up call that life is too short and that when you put things off they never happen kind of thing. Which seemed like an OK idea at the time, but with the near-recession of 2022 and a sharp uptick in interest rates, our monthly payment, which started off as manageable, eventually tripled. And became unmanageable.

And so another thing we’d been quietly discussing and sort of planning for some time came together just as quickly as it had last time, perhaps even more quickly: we decided to sell this house, and then did so, quickly. Once again, we got tens of thousands over asking, and once again we had a previously-scheduled three-week international trip (this time to Mexico City) we were able to do, but this time there is no house waiting for us on the other end. This time, we will need to move into a nearby apartment, probably short term, that my wife thinks is far too small and I think is just right. And I never win these battles, so we might be having a different conversation in about six months.

We will cross that bridge when it happens, but the last time we lived in anything resembling this kind of apartment was, well, never. We lived on the second floor of a house for our first three years and were friendly with the couple downstairs. We lived in a condo in Scottsdale for two years, give or take, but the people around us were old and quiet or just not even there. And then we lived in apartments for four years or so, but not in buildings with people above or below us. These were just one-story units, both on a corner with only one shared wall. The closest we’ve experienced to this new place is our apartment in Mexico, oddly. And even that doesn’t quite measure up since there’s still no one below us (and we’re on the top floor). And … this will be weird.

This morning was our last in this house, and I uncharacteristically slept wonderfully but then woke up to the perfect sendoff: Astound, formerly RCN, but terrible by any name, summarily turned off our Internet access three days earlier than I had scheduled. There was a lot of back and forth on the phone over this, but first they explained that it was because we had started service at a new home (we hadn’t), and then that the people moving here had set up access, which I’m sure they did, but since they don’t get the keys until Friday (explaining my Thursday cut-off date), that’s immaterial. But after being overcharged by this company for almost my entire time in this home, it’s perfect how they left it. Badly. What a terrible, terrible company.

Anyway, most of our experience here in Pennsylvania has been positive. Or perhaps I can say only that the good has outweighed the bad. The drivers here are ridiculously out to lunch, a perfect example of that lack of situational awareness that is so important when you’re in a car. The politics here are insane. The property taxes are way too high. And we had to spend two years walking around the neighborhood waving like idiots at everyone we saw to finally get this neighborhood to open up a little bit. (Yes, I am literally taking responsibility for a new level of neighborly friendliness here.)

And, you know, that probably all sounds like anywhere to you. Because it is. It’s just our anywhere. Or, it was: today, we’ll move onto to this next thing, this next bit of temporary. And then we’ll take it from there.