June 2021 — Brooklyn, New York
In March 2020 the pandemic smashed into Manhattan like a world-killing meteor. Everything shut down. No gym. No bars and restaurants. No synagogue. Getting basics like groceries was scary. I had to stay inside but when I was inside, I was alone. Less than two days into the March lockdown I learned I wasn’t built for solitary confinement. My small, overpriced city apartment with no outdoor space felt like a cell — minus the yard and dining hall, but with the dread of getting shanked by an invisible menace.
Friends whose parents had summer homes fled to them. I joined the exodus because I could, thanks to my friend Andrew. I drove through the night from downtown Manhattan to his farm in Massachusetts. After a panicky stay at a highway hotel I moved to a nearby apartment filled with junkyard furniture, it was literally in a barn — a rough studio carved out of a former sheep house. No oven and lumpy bed, but it was warm in a wet and cold March. There was wifi and hot water, bed linens and a desk—all only a short walk to the greenhouses and fields.
The owner, barnlord?, and I agreed to an off books cash rental for two-weeks. In the slow-motion action sequence of the early pandemic, this turned into three months. From the barn I ran what remained of my small digital agency, wrote ruminative essays, ambled the woods of Carlisle — a hamlet outside historic Concord, MA, of Thoreau and Walden Pond fame. When I wasn’t on my laptop or buying food, I volunteered at Clark Farm.
Fieldwork was the only way to interact with humans. I liked being outside and on task, even if I was barely competent. But hey, I never hurt anyone, or myself too badly, and I extracted lots and lots of weeds.
Andrew’s agricultural life has been my country escape for as long as he’s been farming and for as long as I’ve been in New York: for decades. I’ve always helped with farm chores. I knew seeding in the greenroom was easy work. Transplanting, where you sit in a little chair attached to the rear end of a moving tractor and thrust seedlings into the dabbled soil, takes dexterity and speed — both I lack. Weeding is a meditative repetition I learned to enjoyed because it’s a task I understand and can finish. Dredging unwanted plants scratches the OCD tick you get when vacuuming — do I need to clean the space behind furniture no sees? How about the top of door frames? Rhetorical question.
After making a bed of carrots as clean and uniform as possible, I feel a tired delight with the work. I’m no master grower who feeds hundreds of families nutrient-rich organic produce, but I can assist with the process as I, in turn, live off the camaraderie and fresh food.
#farmlife lasted from a muddy March until the dry summer July bloom. By then the local Airbnbs dried up (there were two in this relatively affluent area that frowns on short term rentals). When the barn had become unavailable in May, I moved to an in-law apartment off of a ranch house that was last decorated in the Reagan administration, but without Nancy’s imperial style and yes, there was a huge framed photo of a church in the bedroom. A warning? A promise of divine delights? Either way, by July 4th the place was no longer available.
After four months of sheltering in rural Massachusetts, I had to leave, but where? New York City wasn’t getting as devastated as it had been in the first months of spring, but it was still very bad. I need someplace I could drive to that was low density. This meant upstate New York or New England, and definitely rural, which I craved not just because of Covid. I was stuck.
Then another close childhood friend moved from Brooklyn to Vermont. He, his Brooklyn-born wife and their two little girls left an apartment in the middle of everything for a massive 18th century farmhouse on five acres of land, with several barn buildings and incredible sunset views. They invited me to join them even though they had just moved in themselves and were drowning in boxes and new home logistics while taking care of small children. “It’s a pandemic,” my friend explained one evening. “It’s hard to make plans. Stay as long as you like.”
Generosity distills into a potent form of gratitude when you’re vulnerable. I am more thankful to these two friends and their families than I can express.
I drove four hours northwest and settled that night into a small apartment attached to the main farmhouse, it was an extension built in the 1960s. Private but close. More Carter-administration than Regan, but hey, free and with friends. I was in heaven. There was a college-style futon on the floor, an old sofa in the living room and desk I provisioned from an outbuilding. I scrubbed the bathroom to a high gloss and vacuumed everything, even the ceilings where spiders had abandoned their traps like wispy ruins.
I enjoyed living in northern Vermont among my friend’s family and relatives, we ate group meals every day, listened to the breathless and occasionally plotted stories from their four-year-old. I introduced their six-year-old to soft-serve maple ice cream, called “creemee” by locals, and taught her how to identify a crew cab pickup truck. The girls, like their parents, are funny and smart and easy to laugh.
I was comforted, but I didn’t have much work to keep me busy. At the end of the day, I was a houseguest. I was grateful, I was safe. I was also alone.
By mid August a frisson came with the night air. It was no longer light by dinner time. Maple leaves on the tallest boughs bleached blonde. This means one thing to a sentimental Jew like myself: the autumn High Holidays were coming — the month-long cycle of holidays for celebration and introspection and self-awareness and sobriety that make up our New Year.
Jewish memory pulled at me with a child’s lose grip that suddenly grew tight. But I was up in Vermont. I needed… something. Some change.
After six months on the road with no glance in the rearview, I needed to know: Where next?
All throughout this journey I had scouted places for the long term. I stayed in an Airbnb in Easthampton, Massachusetts — a little town in the Pioneer Valley near colleges like Mt. Holyoke and UMASS. I slept in a backyard cabin of the leader of a Jewish co-housing project in central Vermont. I stayed in a series of always expensive, always shitty Airbnbs, because Airbnb is terrible, in Hudson, Beacon and Tarrytown along the Hudson River. None of the towns made sense in Covid because in all of them it was the same: I’d be alone.
In the early days of September, as the summer slipped out like the tide, I packed my car, hugged my friends goodbye and drove to Brooklyn. I said I’d back in a few weeks.
It’s now been ten months.
This kicked off my next and last phase of Covid-life: living in furnished apartments while hunting for a long term situation. First, I slept in an apartment for about two weeks left empty by friends who had decamped to Asheville, North Carolina. Then I spent 2 months, which turned into another 2 months, which eventually went to 6 months, living in a furnished parlor floor of a brownstone in Boerum Hill — a gem-like 19th century neighborhood near amenities and infrastructure, but also, a neighborhood that’s ruthlessly segregated. Affluent white people live in multi-million dollar private houses; disenfranchised Black people live in enormous housing projects. Each racial group shops and dines in separate spaces. It felt like the Jim Crow South, but not really, because this is America, everywhere. All the time.
(Last week I voted early for Maya Wiley, the progressive Black woman candidate for New York City mayor. Obviously.)
Almost every day for six months, in a strange mirroring of my formally rural six months, I looked at places in the borough online or in-person. I toured over 50 apartments in Park Slope, Fort Greene, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights and Prospect Heights — neighborhoods I somewhat knew and were somewhat accessible to what I really knew best, which is downtown Manhattan. I browsed over 500 website listings. I created spreadsheets and lists and maps. I biked and walked and subway’ed.
Finally, through luck and ignorance and a frugal ten years of living, I located, financed and bought a cute 1920 house in an up-and-coming part of Brooklyn. The neighborhood is well integrated and, not coincidentally, affordable to middle class and working people. Feels right.
I write you this dispatch of the Thacher Report from southwestern Crown Heights, below Eastern Parkway. It’s on the opposite side of the more august northern neighborhood, but it’s what I can afford and it’s more than fine. London Plane trees with scaly, elephantine bark stretch over rooftops. A wide swath of sky unfolds since there are few high rises to block the view. People say hello when you walk by. Going from west to east, Freddie, Velva, Donette and Migdalia & Hahannah are my neighbors. They are friendly and welcoming.
I bought the house from a developer before it hit the market. “It’s a great deal,” the seller’s broker hissed like an Edenic snake, “you’ll love it. It’s perfect.”
The day I moved in, I discovered the developer hadn’t finished the house. Surprise!
Moving to a half finished house was like listening to the start of an amazing rock anthem that has you pumped and thrilled with its rolling drums and guitar riffs and then just as it’s about —
Silence. Then the lights shut off. It’s suddenly cold.
And you realize you’re dehydrated.
The developer left the closets empty, no hanging poles or shelves, so all of my clothes piled on the floor until I hired expensive people to build out the closets. That took two months. The backyard could still be the setting for a zombie film with its weeds and construction refuse and hastily poured, splotchy concrete patio definitely made by demented children. The front door didn’t shut tight because there was no weather-stripping. Up until now I thought the only correlation between the words “weather” and “stripping” was for woodsy pole dancing.
But wait, there’s more. The basement floods when it rains because the developer left debris in the single pipe that drains the entire house. Most of the kitchen appliances — the microwave, the fridge and the dishwasher — didn’t work or needed immediate repairs. Those oblong, near-the-ceiling “split” HVAC units displayed error codes instead of temperatures. Kitchen trim wasn’t finished. There was no hardware in any of the bathrooms so towels and toilet paper felt as unrooted and unfolded and as I did.
The house was also empty because I own nothing. No sofas or loveseats. No bookcases. No dining or side or end tables. No consoles. No rugs. None of the furnishings that comfort a house. What I had in storage from my jettisoned apartment was an old bed and a desk, pots and pans, boxes of books and a prized Barcelona chair and ottoman gifted to me by my line-drawing friend. It was enough to fill a studio apartment, not a three-bedroom house with a finished basement.
Woe is me, right?
I own a house. It’s palatial compared to my apartment. As they say in business, there’s plenty of upside with limited downside. I’ll abate the flooding with the help of my developer’s contractor — and with the help of me texting him each and every week that ticks by until it’s done. So far it’s only been 16 weeks, but seriously, just today a worker created a “sump wall” to theoretically contain backed up water by the basement door. I have a few more months to see if it works. After all, Jews don’t start praying for rain until fall.
Between an interior designer, a carpenter and my wallet, I will furnish the house. My goal is to sit down and watch TV by August. We’ll see.
My neighbors have only had to scold me once, gently, for not sweeping my patch of frontage. I didn’t know it’s the owner’s responsibility to keep the sidewalk clean. The next day, in a nod to the OCD imperatives of vacuuming, I swept out my large taupe squares of concrete until they were as naked and pristine as when they were born. I weeded the concrete cracks and tree grate, because thanks to Clark Farm, I weed with the best.
To save the best for last, in all of this housing tumult, I’ve been dating a woman, Emily, whom I met last Chanukah — which you can think of as the twinkling winter coda to the somber fall holidays. Sometimes she and I make sense to each other and it’s like a symphony. Other times it’s a polytonal, off-key cacophony. But we’re trying. I’m learning there’s something magnificent in trying together that makes a music of its own.
Since rushing to my car the late afternoon of mid March with bags of clothing humped on my back and tears blurring my vision, after living in over 10 apartments across three states for 13 months, I have now found a place to rest. My day seven.
If it’s the trying that makes more music than the having, then today, in the cusp of July, I can sing a single lyric in my off key voice: Home.