Well, as expected, the final push toward our move has snuck up on us with the delicacy of a Mack truck. Suddenly, in exactly two weeks, a crew of movers will come to pack up our furniture. The same furniture they placed here 2 years ago when we took residence in our Brooklyn home! And what a two years it’s been… We moved in on my birthday in February 2019 and celebrated with pizza delivery and a well earned night’s sleep. (Followed the next evening by a raucous dinner with some friends at a Mexican Restaurant. And then an after party at a dive bar across the street…of which I remember only snippets…) Sadie was still a puppy at 4 months and required lots of attention; close monitoring to make sure she wasn’t destroying the apartment, access to the backyard for digging adventures, and morning trips to Cooper Park where she’d frolic and flirt with the other dogs. (That latter routine became such an important element for Alan and me, too. Throughout Alan’s book writing, the wedding planning, and COVID, our daily walks to the park were a time for us to connect, breathe in fresh-ish air, and forget our stress as we watched our ridiculous dog romp around.)

The rest of 2019 was just as eventful and deliciously chaotic. My husband wrote a book from start to finish in record time, sitting at our kitchen table and silently pulling on his hair. He handed in the manuscript just one week before our wedding in October, at which point he made good on his promise to shift his dogged focus. Side note: I loved planning our wedding. So much so that I had a moment or two of wondering if I should look into a career of wedding planning… Alan was as involved as I asked him to be, and since we have a similar aesthetic it was relatively smooth sailing to the finish line. Or, the altar, as the case may be. Then we headed to France where we spent 2 weeks relishing the post-wedding (and post- book!), lull as we ate, drank, walked, and kissed our way through Provence and Paris.

*I could go on and on about Paris. All it took was 2 trips there to hook me for life. But then I’ll probably start thinking about how we can’t go back there for the foreseeable future and I’ll get sad…

Our lovely home was waiting for us in Brooklyn, which helped to dull the sting of leaving that magical country. We dove right into planning our first Thanksgiving as a married couple, and the apartment did not disappoint! The kitchen proved more than capable of turning out a turkey, all the sides, and even a plum tart (made by Alan with a recipe we’d just learned at a cooking class in Provence). Our living room comfortably hosted a pre-dinner cocktail hour with friends dropping by and our dining room juuuust fit the 10 dinner guests and all the delectable dishes and drinks. After dinner, we played four square (my first introduction to the game), in our backyard, keeping safely away from the fire that was slowly blazing in the fire pit. Somehow, I have NO pictures of the event- I guess that means I was too busy playing hostess? So you’ll have to trust that the apartment looked lovely and the faces were all smiling. 😉

Then we decorated the place for Christmas. A big boost in my spirit every year, solidified by my Scandinavian roots. Over the years I’ve inherited and collected Norwegian and Swedish candle holders, table runners, and little “Nisse” (gnome) figurines to scatter over the bookshelves and tabletops. And there was something about celebrating the season as newlyweds that made it seem…dare I say…magical? One evening in late December, Alan and I drove to Dyker Heights where the houses outdo themselves every year with their holiday decorations. (I had never heard of it before, but apparently this is a pretty well-known destination for New Yorkers during Christmastime…? Sadie and I were first-timers and were beyond shocked by the sheer amount of electricity alone that’s required to light up the displays!) We spent Christmas Eve and Day on Long Island with my family, a tradition that’s so special that I’ve never voluntarily missed it. (Until this year… thanks, Covid.) My sisters and I sang choral trios at a chapel service as we’ve done for about 20 years, then the family gathered at my mother’s house to eat risengrynsgrøt, a delicious Norwegian rice porridge. (This tradition we have upheld for my entire life and this year my mother has promised to arrange a handoff of the porridge for Alan and me to safely eat at home on Christmas Eve.) Presents were opened as always on the night on the 24th, followed by stockings the next morning.

Then it was 2020, and we were looking forward to settling into our new life as a married couple. We joke that just as things start to slow down, we find something new and exciting to throw in the mix. But in a way, we got what we wanted… Yes, January and February had their eventful moments. My band did the music for an off-Broadway show, which required a weekend work retreat and lots of rehearsing, and Alan had a big project come up at work that kept him extra busy for weeks. And then March hit and suddenly, one day, everything stopped. Except for the sirens, which seemed to be all around us. No more raucous dinners at the Mexican restaurant with friends, no more daily commutes to the office for me, no more casual walks around the neighborhood without full PPE. What we had was reduced to the contents of our apartment. Alan, Sadie, and me. Our books, my instruments, the kitchen. I got very acquainted with our backyard, which had been Sadie’s up until that point. But now I was out there digging right alongside her, pulling up the persistent weeds and painting the cement border to our little plot of earth. (I remember one day spending all daylight hours back there, painting and listening to a podcast about Fred Rogers and crying. There were definitely many other random and spontaneous tears this year.) I think in time I’ll be able to better articulate and process the experience of our many months in lockdown. There was a lot of reimagining of our space: the back room became Alan’s office since I was now in and out of the kitchen all day long and his table there was no longer as quiet (or clean), as it had been before. I learned to reinvent my exercise routine, since…no more yoga in the city after work. I carved out a spot for aerobics and weights next to our bed until I inherited a stationary bike from our upstairs neighbor. And now I’m hooked!! I also got a chance to watch foreign language tv shows while I rode, since normally I like to knit when watching anything (and can’t easily follow the subtitles simultaneously).

For all the restrictions that our apartment represented, it treated us well. More than well. We were safe and cozy but never too cramped. Sadie had space to roam in the backyard, especially helpful in the early days when I sometimes panicked about leaving the building. The neighbors in the two apartments upstairs were very cautious and respectful, and we all fell into our silent choreography of waiting until the others were safely in their apartment before venturing out of our own. We took turns wiping down the doorknobs and answering the door for package deliveries. Our backyard neighbors who we saw over the fence would keep us posted on neighborhood gossip; which was now pretty bleak as they told us who had caught the virus and who had died. We started saying good morning to people we passed on the sidewalk, since we were all masked and unable to smile. And who knew which of those people we passed were living by themselves and needed to have some human interaction? We eventually took advantage of the outdoor seating at some local restaurants. We learned the new routine of speaking up through our muffled mouths and angling our chairs to keep out of the air path of other diners. It wasn’t normal, but we knew it was temporary and it was certainly livable.

Like I’ve said before, something started to shift during this time in lockdown. As I’m sure it did for many other people! We set our plans in motion and now are nearing the finish line. Or the diving board, perhaps. The house is there, waiting for us. Our apartment is starting to look less like a home as we slowly box things away and slack on the dusting. We’ve told our fellow dog parents at the park that Sadie won’t be coming there much longer and said goodbyes to our neighbors. Incidentally, one of the two upstairs apartments got a new tenant a few weeks ago and it’s actually made this transition less bittersweet and more… damn sweet. No details required, but Alan and I are both more eager than ever to not share a front door or a ceiling with other people. With the vaccine in sight but still not in hand, it’s clear the next few months are going to be difficult for NY and for the country as a whole. Where our household had started to get a little lazy with our precautions, we now see we have to double down. I’m going to miss so much once we move, but those people and places wouldn’t exactly be accessible to me for a long time, anyway. Some sense of normal life will come back, I believe that. And we’ll come back to Brooklyn to visit our friends and restaurants and theaters. So for now, I’m grateful for the time that’s been handed to us to just focus on our move. We’ll set up our house (and I can only guess at what that will entail), and continue to live, work, and play as safely as we can. We’ll make our home ready for guests whenever that’s possible again. I’ll relish in not being woken at 1 am by the front door slamming. And we’ll miss Brooklyn, no doubt about that. But I have a hunch we’ll be so busy being happy that, in time, we’ll get over it.