Lauren B. Lentini

I’m going to try to beat the clock and post my recap of the second half of 2021 before the year expires. It was…a lot. Incredibly stressful, and incredibly rewarding at the same time. My last blog, in June, was written during that glorious and all-too-brief interlude–post-vaccination and pre-variants. I quickly realized that, when we look back on it in years or decades, we’ll think of it as the middle of the pandemic and not the end. I still think it’s worth considering as a significant milestone, but there aren’t enough hours left in the year to get into all that. We have too much else to cover.

June

The thing I didn’t mention in my previous recap of most of June is that we were actively searching for a place for my mom to live in Connecticut. And considering the market situation, it was a very active process that required constant vigilance on Zillow. We were on the verge of giving up when we finally found a place for her.

The other detail I left out of my recap was the reasoning behind April’s dumpster. You see, we realized that our house had shrunk since we added a third occupant, and the clean-out was intended as the first of a series of major interventions to remedy the situation. But we were playing a classic game of Love It or List It, and as long as we were spending so much time on Zillow for my mom, we were casually keeping an eye out for any houses that fit our own needs, as well.

Riding the relief and the high of securing housing for my mom, we decided to ask our real estate agent to check out this one house right around the corner from us. It had been sitting on the market for weeks, because it was extremely dated and obscenely overpriced. You could hardly see its potential through the decades of bad design decisions, but there was something about it that just kept drawing us back in. We even drove past it a few times — it was literally one street over. It was just a lark, we thought, going to check it out. It was still a lark when we decided to put in a low-ball offer and see what happened.

July

Even though we claimed to not be that invested in it, the fact that the owner made us wait a whole week before she countered was agonizing. A whole lot of this process (dealing with her, in particular), was quite agonizing. That’s a whole other post, one that I’ve tried to write multiple times without success. There were so many hurdles and hoops to jump through, we kept our real estate agents and lawyers and mortgage brokers on their toes, but in July we went under contract and decided we were going to move my mom and move ourselves at the same time.

So, now we had to sell our house. And, because our real estate agent is the best, she connected us with an interior designer to tell us exactly how to do the staging. It was incredible, really. She walked through each room with us, told us to replace this light fixture and remove that piece of furniture and add a plant and a pop of color here, there, and everywhere. She recorded everything on her iPad and emailed me a comprehensive to-do list that I put into my favorite app (Notion) and hounded Jerald with for weeks. We did so. Much. Work. Including packing up hundreds of books.

August

My mom officially moved to Connecticut in August, shortly after Jordan’s 3rd birthday. We spent an incredible day at a children’s museum for his birthday, which was a damn sight better than staying at home with no power for his 2nd. Will there be an actual party for #4? We shall see.

For my birthday, we went to see Modest Mouse in New Haven. I saw them back in 2001, mere days after 9/11. I wrote an excellent blog post in my head about how it literally felt like time travel, but obviously it never made it to the screen. Poor Isaac wasn’t having the best night, but I still had a blast.

September

We planned from the beginning (to the extent that we had a plan) to stagger our move-in and move-out dates, so we could do some renovations first, but I’m not sure we realized it would take until the beginning of September to actually get our house on the market. The process wasn’t anything like I remembered from the last time we sold a house. There’s an app for that now, for one thing. After more days than we had hoped of imposing on our family’s hospitality on showing days and trying to keep our house looking like a West Elm catalog (as Jerald said), we accepted an offer and went under contract.

And we closed on our new house. After several false attempts. We learned that, unless you’re prepared to walk away, you really don’t have much recourse when the other party decides simply not to fulfill the terms of the contract. Driving past and shouting expletives doesn’t help, but it is somewhat cathartic.

We also went to our second concert of the year: Dead and Company. If Modest Mouse was like time travel, this was kind of like an alternate universe. Very different from the types of shows I usually attend (though it’s been so long since I was a regular concert-goer that “usual” is a real stretch). But still a lot of fun, and people-watching second to none.

October

For several weeks in September and October, we lived in two houses. We spent the nights in the home where the pets and most of our furniture were, but Jerald spent most days supervising the contractors who were replacing the majority of the flooring in our new home. (Between the bad taste and the lingering smell of Marlboros, so much of it just had to go.)

But eventually, it was moving day. We had some phenomenal movers who really didn’t know what they were in for, moving our dozens of book boxes, picking up furniture stashed at two other houses, and dealing with our haphazard packing job. We scheduled the movers a week before closing, and we ran out of boxes, so I packed in laundry baskets and garbage bags and anything I could find. I thought we’d schlep our poorly packed property ourselves, but those guys grabbed just about everything! Even so, there was plenty left over there to keep us hauling loads of crap right up until closing day (or at least, when we initially thought we’d be closing).

November

We were finally living in one house again, but it felt like we moved in in stages. When they replaced the floors upstairs, we could only access the kitchen and the sunroom. They finished those the day before we moved in, but there was a delay on the tiles in the basement. And also difficulty removing the old and truly heinous tiles, so much that they had to call in a special team. So we couldn’t go down there for a while. And just as it started to feel like we were actually living there, the painters arrived and moved all our furniture around again.

Despite delays (including me changing my mind about paint colors multiple times), both jobs were completed just in time for us to host Thanksgiving in our new digs. We couldn’t host my brother and his kids, as we were hoping, because covid. But we had a Thanksgiving all the same.

November’s live show was Dave Matthews Band, Jerald’s all-time favorite (and a band I’d probably never listen to if not for him). It turned out to be one of the best shows I’ve ever seen; technically speaking, it was just astounding. We had the best seats of any concert I’ve ever been to in my life. We were immediately behind the guy running the soundboard, and he gave a virtuoso performance. I’ve always been fascinated by the light and video aspects of any concert, and I couldn’t get over how stunning these were. Most of all, Jerald was so very happy and I was thrilled to see him that way.

December

After months of having random people in our home all day every day, we decided that we wouldn’t schedule any contractors in December. There was more than enough going on, anyway.

For one thing, we had tickets to see Hamilton. We took a train to the city, crossed state lines and everything. With omicron numbers where they were, it was probably a bigger risk than we should have taken, but we bought the tickets during the aforementioned interlude and they were too good. We masked the whole time and had to show proof of vaccination everywhere we went. And then we walked up to the theater and they handed us a letter that stated the show was canceled because of covid.

And then my brother’s second attempt to come visit us for the holiday was canceled because of covid.

And then a couple of days later, Christmas was canceled because of covid. Jerald tested positive the day after his birthday. My mom and Jordan and I were all negative, so he commenced isolation. He didn’t get all that sick, fortunately, but I struggled so much with taking care of him and Jordan and work and everything else…I couldn’t bear thinking about Christmas at the same time. Especially not a Zoom Christmas. So I postponed it until Jerald was out of quarantine and we could all celebrate together. So today we celebrate Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve at the same time, filled with cautious optimism for the potential that 2022 holds.