On March 25, 2020, life in Idaho was put on pause.

Everyone knew what was coming when the governor greeted the morning with a tweet about the “important announcement” he’d be making that afternoon from the National Guard base. By then, less than two weeks after Idaho’s first confirmed COVID case, the pandemic malaise had already settled over the Treasure Valley. Panic shopping, side eyes and strange behavior everywhere. The creep was on, and you could feel it in the air. It was only a matter of time before the state shut down, and that time came on a partly cloudy Wednesday afternoon six days after the Spring Equinox.

While the governor was preparing for his press conference, I was ping-ponging around Boise running errands before the reckoning – the liquor store, the vet, the running store. When the gov hit the podium, Magnolia and I had just returned home from the do-it-yourself dog wash after giving a 12-year-old shepweiler his last proper bath for who knew how long. Short of punching my way through WinCo to the last pack of one-ply store-brand toilet paper, this was the best I could do at the zero hour to prepare our household for the great unknown. Besides, we were well-stocked on toilet paper, even if that innocuous task had proven ridiculously challenging to complete in the days leading up to the shutdown.

Thankfully, we got a head start, which is helpful when you find yourself in grocery-cart combat with frothing hoarders. Early afternoon on March 13, Erica had texted me from Fred Meyer “before the rush,” as she wrote, and I assumed she meant the dinnertime Friday shitshow we usually tried to avoid. But she was referring to the forthcoming announcement of Idaho’s first positive case later that afternoon. A reliable source had tipped her through Facebook, then at Fred she overheard a woman in nurse scrubs talking on her phone about getting her shopping done before the announcement. Erica got everything on her list and tossed in a few staples, then went home and ordered a cappuccino machine with a leftover Macy’s gift card from Christmas.

That evening, we talked strategy and set the alarm. We woke up early on Saturday the 14th and left the driveway in separate vehicles, full divide-and-conquer mode, on parallel missions to stock our pantry and search for Lysol wipes and other increasingly rare booty. Like everyone, we were forced to play the game a bit, and though the panic pirates beat us to most of it, I did manage to snag the last bottle of antibacterial soap and the last two packs of flushable wipes at Staples, of all places. That said, we were sensible people and we refused to pillage the earth for butt wipe in bulk. We didn’t have the space for it anyway.

The shutdown on the 25th was inevitable, but when the moment arrived and I got home and shut the door for the first time after the governor had ordered me to stay there, it still felt strange – an eerie tonal shift that turned a workaday Wednesday into something not quite like terror but definitely terrible. In response, I made a pot of chili, got drunk and went to bed without setting the alarm. The groggy new morning greeted us with a terrifying question: Now what?

Fortunately, Erica and I still had jobs – mostly. Other than mandatory remote work, which for Erica had begun on March 16, it was business as usual for her employer. Working in retail marketing, my situation was a bit murky. The Record Exchange, which clearly did not qualify as an essential business, was forced to halt everything but our online shops, and my full-time hours marketing an independent record store were temporarily reduced to quarter-time. My professional DJ work, which had added thousands of dollars to my annual income over the past seven years, came to a screeching halt on March 13 following a last-night-on-earth-type set at the Funky Taco.

Our family three hunkered down in our small house and tried to make the best of it. I won’t bore you with the nitty-gritty details of what we did to pass the time, because it’s the same shit you did to pass the time: We read books, worked puzzles and binge-watched TV series. We made soups and baked goods, took family walks through the neighborhood and ordered weekly takeout to support our favorite local restaurants. More important to this story, we found ourselves face-to-face with a house stuffed with stuff, a decade-old to-do list of repairs and a second terrifying question: Double down or skip town?

Our talk of moving back East in 2021 had all but ceased when the pandemic hit, but as we started making piles for the thrift store and packing boxes of stuff we could live without for a year, we asked ourselves, what’s the endgame here? If the economy tanks, which seemed inevitable, what would the housing market look like in a year, and how many thousands of dollars would we potentially lose by delaying a home sale? More importantly, how many more years would our parents last, and how awful would we feel if we abruptly lost one of them to COVID and we couldn’t even leave the state?

As we reappraised and rearranged our space, the answer came easily, even if it cut our 15-month plan down to five months. Stuck inside with a sudden wealth of time, we started the real work of rehabbing our house so we could get the hell out of it and high-tail it to Ohio before the start of the new school year.

We called our plumber first. “Mountaintop” Mike is a burly teddy bear of a guy who rides motorcycles to blow off steam and never shows up for a job without his sweet puppy dog riding shotgun in the truck. He’s honest, affordable and damn good at what he does, the type of dude you want in your caravan when it comes time for a hard charge into the apocalypse. Mike had already been to our house in February to rebuild a toilet, and roughly half of our to-do list involved him in some capacity. Every visit, he inevitably discovered another issue with the 55-year-old network of pipes in the crawl space underneath the house.

When I dialed him up, my first question was, are you currently working? Turns out that’s a dumb thing to ask a plumber during a pandemic – or anytime, really. In addition to juggling his regular schedule of routine repairs and emergency calls, Mike suddenly had a bunch of thumb-twiddlers like us calling him to take care of long-overdue to-do lists. When we finally got him to the house, we started with the cheapest repair and systematically worked through our list as money allowed. The funny thing was, with nowhere to go and little more than food and booze left to buy, we suddenly found ourselves with a lot more bank in our bank account. It helped that my quarter-time work status qualified me for unemployment benefits, which came with the extra $600 a week from the feds for five of the six weeks I was on the dole. This extra three grand, along with our stimulus money, was put toward the repairs and helped us, at least initially, avoid adding to our mound of credit card debt. It did wonders for the stress that had been pressing down on my shoulders for the past decade.

Ultimately our credit cards would suffer some abuse, as the big to-do list only got bigger after the recommendations made by our real estate agent to pretty up the joint and put us in position to pass a home inspection. By the time we were done, after checking off the plumbing, a major chimney rebuild, a sewer line repair, exterior trim replacement, new kitchen tile, new range oven, new microwave and a fresh exterior paint job, we had spent over $6,000 getting our house ready to put on the market.

But before we could do that, there were even bigger conversations in front of us – this time with our bosses. In the middle of our shutdown home repair spectacular, Erica was promoted to senior graphic designer. She had known about the promotion for months, but when she first caught wind of it, we weren’t even talking about moving (at least not seriously). Once it came and we had a clear look at what the promotion meant professionally and financially, it was not something any reasonable person would walk away from to start anew in another job market. Which meant that the only way we could make the move back East was if Erica got approved to work remotely on a permanent basis.

Most of Erica’s coworkers spent most of their time under the halogens, but even before the pandemic, remote work was not unheard of within her company. Erica already had been working some of her hours from home each week, and in the first 18 months on the job, she had proven to her boss – a compassionate working mother herself – that her output would not falter at home, and in fact, like many professionals at the outset of the pandemic, Erica was feeling even more focused and productive after trading sensible heels for fuzzy socks.

Nonetheless, the talk with her boss was a moment-of-truth moment, a certified Big Deal for our family, one that would determine whether we stayed put in Boise or put both feet firmly into the moving process so we could make it to Ohio before the fall. If Erica got a no, that meant no-go on the move, and we’d simply settle back into our life in Boise and take another look at our long-term plans post-pandemic. Which wouldn’t be terrible – after all, we liked Boise, and at least we’d be caught up on home repairs for a while. Still, it would have been difficult to disguise our disappointment in that scenario, but thankfully Erica got a yes – and a quick one at that – and our course was set.

But not before it was my turn for a talk with the bosses. Years ago, in an honest inebriated moment over the second or third after-work beer, I had revealed that a move back East was highly likely before I hit 45, but the conversation got left at the bar and it never resurfaced, and anyway, it was a moot point at the time. But here we were all of the sudden, and no matter how many times I went over the script in my head, or how carefully I considered the timing and circumstances, I knew that no one (including me) was going to be fully prepared for the talk. I had worked at The Record Exchange for nearly 11 years by then – almost triple the amount of time I had spent at any previous gig – and the people I worked for and with I considered family and friends, ones who played a huge part in a monumental shift in personal and professional well-being one decade ago. After years of feeling out of place in various work environments – mainly newsrooms – when I started working at The Record Exchange, I finally stopped feeling like a square peg in a round hole. I finally felt I had found a job that I was born to do. I finally felt at home. And I was pretty certain that leaving Boise meant leaving that behind.

When the day came, it came abruptly, a few days before my target date and during a casual conversation that suddenly turned serious. It was far from ideal – early morning, caught off guard, no time to go over my mental script – but there was no turning back. I gathered my composure as best I could and laid it all out on the table where we sat, the same circular office table that had hosted so many talks and toasts of kinship before it. As my heart pounded and emotions surged inside me, I shared the whats and the whys and the hows, and among the transition scenarios I spelled out, I pitched one out-there idea that wouldn’t mean a complete goodbye. Then I drove home to start the real work of moving three lives 2,000 miles across a country in full COVID crisis mode.

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