Moving

Last December, the first chance I had after the election, I drove up to New York and did a giant loop: Buffalo to Rochester to Syracuse to Albany to Hudson to Kingston to Binghamton to Ithaca to Corning to Salamanca, then home.

I could’ve been happy just about anywhere with pretty scenery and access to a decent-sized town. But I’m one of those “grow where you’re planted” people as long as the state government is standing between us and the Nazis instead of rolling over for them, like the red states we left behind.

The Hudson Valley really drew me because it looks so similar to WV’s New River Gorge area where I grew up. I contacted a realtor and started getting a plan together. The plan was ideally to sell both houses. I got a new realtor in WV after the family friend we hired the first time essentially sat on her ass for a six-month contract. I got a realtor in OH and started getting my own house ready. As soon as the WV house went under contract we put ours on the market. Ours sold in three days and the contract in WV fell through.

When I went up to check on mom’s house over the winter, the heat had broken. I tried to wash my hands because I ate Pies n Pints on the way up the mountain, and water shot out the side of the bathroom faucet. I tried the kitchen sink, heard a gurgle, and the water that had just gone down the drain was leaking into the cabinet. We had to turn the water off, get a plumber out, and he chased leaks all over those pipes for a week.

We lived in an AirBnB up the street from our old house in OH while we waited for Mom’s house to sell again. Once it was under contract we came up to NY again so everyone could visit and we could start our house hunt, but we didn’t really think we would find one that soon. Everyone said we needed to move up, rent, and look from here. But we managed to find a great house on a two-acre mostly wooded lot. The front has this optical illusion thing going on, and I almost overlooked it online because of it, so there was only one other offer.

When ours got accepted we were over the moon, but then we had to make it through the closing from hell. Mom has a perfectly good POA in WV, and I was able to sell her house using that, but NY real estate transactions give zero shits about out-of-state POAs. We had a lawyer telling us the POA was a no-go, a frankly delusional loan officer telling us we would work it out somehow, and a realtor in the middle poking them both and giving advice, but no one was really direct with us that it would be very difficult to actually put Mom’s name on the house or the mortgage. It almost cost us our contract. We were looking at apartments just in case. If we had known at the beginning what we know now, we would have gotten our own NY real estate lawyer before we even got started.

But then the WV house closed at exactly the right time. We were able to wire the proceeds to our closing lawyer and not have to figure out Schrodinger’s POA. For the entire month long closing, while we were getting these daily or every-other-day “you’re getting the house/you’re losing the house” updates, we lived at the Hampton Inn. We had another AirBNB all lined up in NY, but instead of the resort house advertised in the listing, we all arrived on May 2nd to a house full of dog hair, swarming carpenter ants, and mouse shit. We slept on the couches and left the next day, and I had to wrangle a refund out of them while we all moved into two hotel rooms. I sent graphic mouse shit photos until they capitulated. I got back every dime.

Mom did pretty damn great throughout this whole adventure. She’s happy as long as she knows where her family is. She says she doesn’t even remember being in memory care now; the new place reminds her of Hinton and she mixes them up a lot, so I guess her mind reverted back to WV and skipped Ohio. Good for her. 😀

We finally moved into our new house in the Hudson Valley at the beginning of June. The air conditioner promptly died, but we’ve only had two hot days so we haven’t even missed it much. It’s beautiful here. I have a lot of the same plants and animals in my yard as I did growing up. Everywhere I drive, there are mountains and rivers, creeks and lakes, wildlife and wildflowers. Waterfalls. I don’t have enough eyes to take it all in.

We are slowly building our new life here. I feel like I can breathe easier. It’s not just the politics, it’s the landscape. I never knew how much I missed the mountains. I feel more at home here already than I ever did in the midwest.