Catching up

It’s been over a year since I last wrote here – and not just any year! So much has happened… to us, to the house, to the world… it’s hard to know where to start.

The last entry here was right after Christmas 2019. Though the house was not completely finished, it was certainly habitable and the end was in sight (or so we thought, for of course, in reality there never is an end). When we returned to Atlanta, a lot of wheels started into motion, the most significant of which was our decision to leave Atlanta and move to Claverack permanently. This had been the plan all along, although we had only recently decided to pull the trigger.

As it turned out, the timing was fortuitous.

Our Buckhead condo went on the market and by February was under contract. After 16 years in the same home, the process of packing for a 1000-mile move was daunting. As with any move, the discarding was the most time-consuming part. How had we accumulated SO MUCH STUFF?

Our last couple of nights in Atlanta were spent in a hotel and the day after the closing, March 10th, we started the drive north. The news was full of reports of a novel coronavirus that was causing concern in Asia and now in the Pacific Northwest. At the hotel where we stayed to break the two-day journey, we were careful to use hand sanitizer. Nobody was wearing a mask at that point – the idea seemed overdramatic.

We got to Claverack late in the evening, and the next morning the two moving trucks arrived, with a cheerful and seemingly tireless crew of four. Two days later, they departed, leaving us with a hundred boxes (the books alone, oh the books!)… and the news that New York state was going into lockdown. We did a rather rushed and somewhat scary shop for a load of groceries, hunkered down at home, and focused on creating some order out of the chaos in the new house.

At this point, of course, nobody knew how long the situation was going to last.