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 int...