If Fall is a big question mark, that’s OK. It’s a big question mark for everyone, and you’ll be at least [in?] one place.
April 16 2020
Writing those sentences in April, on a day that came a little more than a week after the peak of deaths in the city, the summer of 2020 seemed unimaginable: its protests and fireworks, so much heat and noise, a little hope, a lot of time outdoors in parks, on hikes, and once they opened, on playgrounds with friends. The men outside our window were constant, and the “one place” we were “in”–maybe that’s what that last phrase meant?–felt not like anything that was ours. It was our home and often it felt like it, but just as often it felt tenuous, on the edge, not entirely safe.
The new space felt strange and slightly dangerous partly because of the rhythms of our leases for most of our lives as parents. In 2014, when S was pregnant with Monk, when Tune was just over a year, we were month to month in our place a block from the GWB. We found a gorgeous big place on W. 188th and Wadsworth Avenue with a December 1 start date. We moved over Thanksgiving, and we’d do that again in a year, and then we’d do that again in 2019, just before the pandemic. What moving over Thanksgivings meant was that the real nature of wherever we’d moved into would only reveal itself months later, as winter thawed into Spring.
So as COVID unfurled itself in the city over the course of February, we were just starting to understand the nature of the new building: how the lack of an elevator meant a smaller number of informal contacts; how our ground floor apartment changed even the number of faces we’d pass in a stairwell (uncovered as our faces were back then). The ground floor meant noise, strangers drinking outside our window all day every day. It meant the foot traffic of the corner store on the other side of our kitchen wall being, with a few exceptions, our primary experience of ‘neighbors’
That window, and then men outside it, shaped our COVID experience indelibly. We’d just moved there from the old apartment, the one not so far from the author of this gorgeous essay, the one where we knew the names of nearly everyone on our side of the building, and half the folks on the other side, the one where our kids had automatic playdates every time we took the elevator downstairs. That window, and the men outside it, was one reason that, when the lease was up in November 2020, we went to Texas until our kids had a break, and came back to the city at the start of April, to a new apartment, one we’d never seen, a possible home that was, for all we knew, itself one of the pandemic’s big, personal question marks.
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