Episode 1: We Moved Across the Country During the Pandemic. Here’s How (and Why) Pt. 1
It started with Pittsburgh.
The new year 2020 was underway and we had been talking about moving. In recent years, our friends had grown accustomed to hearing us allude to a move “back East,” but we rarely lingered on the topic or offered anything in the way of specifics because we didn’t have any. Even amongst ourselves, the dinner conversations with my wife, Erica, and daughter, Magnolia, had held little more than vague notions that vaporized by the time we cleared the table. But the tone of these conversations was shifting. Discussions were deepening. And they were lingering. Over Christmas break 2019, as we returned to the table night after night for board games, red wine and holiday sugar, so too did the topic of moving. Which made sense because we were deep into a move within our home, trading bedrooms with Magnolia and upgrading her new space with carpet and paint that we had purchased with our holiday bonuses. We were not, however, thinking any bigger at this point – the room switch was all about preparing Magnolia for adolescence and giving her the physical (and emotional) space to grow through junior high and high school in Boise. Only later, and retroactively, did we mark the project as the first of several upgrades and repairs we would make in the next half-year to get our house ready to sell and flee for Ohio.
But back to Pittsburgh.
After Christmas break, with the wassailed glow of the holiday season and that new carpet smell fading away, talk of moving briefly left the table as the churn of daily life – work, school, lessons, practices – once again took over. But the following Sunday – January 12 to be exact – the newspaper brought us, along with details of a strange new virus emerging in China, a Parade magazine with a cover shot of shiny downtown Pittsburgh and the bold declaration: Live Here and Live to 100! Normally I ignore Parade. Nothing against this American print institution or its perpetual-smile tone, but I have better things to do with my Sunday morning than peruse the latest commemorative plate offerings or suffer the everything-is-awesome repartee between Kristen Bell and the interviewer lobbing her softballs. But this issue was different. Erica saw it first, read the cover story and brought it to my attention, probably the first time in sixteen years of reading Sunday papers together that she had brought a Parade article to my attention. And just like that, the moving talk was reignited.
“What do you know about Pittsburgh?” Erica asked me. And what I knew about Pittsburgh was, more than any other Rust Belt city in the past twenty-ish years, it had built itself a reputation as a hip, artsy and affordable place to live. And I mentioned this to Erica from the position of someone who, despite growing up two hours away in Northeast Ohio, had never set foot in Pittsburgh, yet had read and heard, via several reliable sources, that it had built itself a reputation as a hip, artsy and affordable place to live. I also mentioned Warhol. And perogies.
I read the article and agreed, as much as it pained me to agree with an innocuous listicle in Parade – especially one dishing props to the home of the six-time Super Bowl champion Steelers – that Pittsburgh sounded like an ideal landing spot, not to mention a good place to die if you endeavored to live longer than your average Milwaukeean. Door to door, it’s a 1-hour, 48-minute drive to my parents’ house in Stow, Ohio, and only four hours to northwest Philadelphia, home to the majority of the creative team Erica works with as a senior graphic designer. A cursory comparison of real estate prices in Philly and Pittsburgh provided further evidence that Steel City might be right for our family of modest means when it came time to move, and the more and more we talked, the more and more it felt like the time to move had come.
So how did we arrive at this crossroads anyway? Isn’t Boise like, the It city of It cities, the rare mid-market-artsy-techy-low-crime gem that creative-class parents like us dream about finding and inhabiting until we’ve avocadoed our last toast? And wasn’t Boise really good to us over the last fourteen years, enriching our lives with a phenomenal kid and more personal, professional and creative fulfillment than any other place we’ve lived?
Yes and yes. But…
There’s a lot of buts, and we’ll take a good look at all of them later in the story, but there’s one big but that kept sticking out: family, and more specifically, our parents. Mine are in their early seventies and relatively healthy, but scary shit is starting to happen. Erica’s mom and stepdad are in their late sixties and also relatively healthy, but scary shit will start happening to them, too. Seeing these people only once or twice a year had already started to feel unacceptable by the time Erica lost her grandfather and father within a span of nine months in 2017 and 2018. Suddenly the thousands of miles between Boise and our parents felt like millions.
But back to Pittsburgh again.
Even if we never live there and the Browns never get to the Super Bowl and we end up flipping the script and hauling ass back west to Scottsdale for the sunset years, Steel City will forever live in our family lore for sparking that first capital-S Serious talk about moving. We found ourselves asking legit oh-my-god-are-we-really-considering-this questions: What would a move across the country look like? What would we need to do to make it happen? And when, reasonably speaking, would we hit the road?
First things first, we had our daughter to consider. Magnolia was privy to these conversations from the start and all in on a big move, even though it meant a hard reset on school, friends and extracurriculars. She was halfway through sixth grade, and letting her finish the school year in Boise was our top priority. So that took us to summer 2020 at the earliest, but faced with long lists of home repairs and moving logistics, half a year felt premature. And a bit hasty.
Then there was work. Given her company’s good track record of supporting remote scenarios even before the word “coronavirus” had entered casual lexicon, Erica was fairly confident she could keep her job, but it wasn’t a given. For me, as the marketing director for an independent record store based in Boise, it likely meant finding a new gig where we landed, or finding a new gig that determined where we landed. All of which said to us, we need more time.
In any case, there was no need to rush. We had a good thing going in Boise – we liked our jobs, we liked the schools, we liked our social lives – and for the first time in a long time we were starting a new year with firm hands on the wheel after years of occasional spinouts. We also had grown far less impulsive than we had been in our younger years – dare I say we matured – and anyway, “impulsive” wasn’t going to cut it with a cross-country move involving a kid, a dog, a cat and much higher stakes than we had in our twenties.
So where to go from here? Simply saying “let’s do it” is much different than actually doing it, and we didn’t want to look back in ten years at what we didn’t do. Not for something this big, this important. So we gave ourselves a deadline:
By spring 2021, we would be back East.
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