A New Home
Saying goodbye; saying hello
For the past two months I’ve been saying a lot of goodbyes and a lot of hellos. On May 26th my husband, daughter, and dog said goodbye to San Francisco, our home since the summer of 2019. We said goodbye to people, places, and things that made our time there so special. I never thought I would love a city the way I love my hometown of NYC so my emotions upon leaving were a surprise to me. That same day we said hello to New Jersey, our new (and hopefully last) state. The month of June was spent in a rental, or staying with various family members, kind of floating around, simultaneously loving and loathing our last taste of living in limbo. Living in limbo was something we had gotten very used to, having moved 10 times in the past decade. It has its benefits, for sure, but we’ve grown tired of that life and are now planting roots. Two weeks ago we said goodbye to our rental, to all the floating around, and said hello to our new home in Berkeley Heights, NJ. This move hits different, as the kids say. There’s something about this move, to the suburbs of NYC, near friends and family, near where we both grew up, that feels very permanent. We hope that’s the case. My husband says he wants to die in this house. I get what he means.
So now there are a lot of hellos. Hello to all the wildlife in our backyard, the new neighbors, my daughter’s new school. Hello to drive-thrus and driving everywhere. Hello to the quiet and the dark and the lightning bugs. Hello to homeownership.
But before all these hellos, there was the San Francisco goodbye I mentioned. The Saturday before we left I sat at an outdoor table eating breakfast alone. I wrote in my journal and cried a little behind my Wayfarers. Here’s what came out, because before I move forward with this newsletter I need to close this last chapter of my life:
Five more sleeps until we say goodbye to San Francisco. Until we say goodbye to the hills, the wind, the perpetual chill in the air, the bridge, the coast, California. The Bridge. She really is majestic. I now understand why she’s loved, revered, photographed. She’s beautiful and big and strong. I will miss looking at her every day, waking up and saying good morning with a baby, then a toddler, on my hip. Some days she’d be cloaked in an oversized turtleneck sweater of fog, no parts of her visible, just covered and safe and hidden. Some days she’d be wearing clouds like a tube top, covering her curves only in the middle. Other days she was naked and beautiful, every inch of her red body gleaming, proud, and powerful. Gazing at her from our apartment every day for almost 3 years is a privilege I will never forget. I will miss her. I will miss this city. This city of liberals and Lombard Street, of weirdos and wine country, of steep hills and sixty-degree days. There are picturesque views everywhere you turn. You can thank the hills for that. Even the thick blanket of fog is picturesque in its own way. There can be a beauty to a lack of visibility, or a mystery at least.
I love this city but it is not perfect. The liberals can be too liberal, the weirdos too weird. I’ve seen the dark underbelly of humanity right outside our apartment building. The tents, the needles, the filth, the unclothed body parts, it’s all true what they say. There are people who walk around like zombies, mumbling to themselves, scratching, staring through you. It’s heartbreaking and horrifying at the same time. How far has this city come since Slouching Toward Bethlehem? Since Joan witnessed a five-year-old on an acid trip? Hard to tell, I guess. I’m no expert.
But still. The history. The history of this place is undeniable. You can feel the fight for freedom, free love, everywhere. You can feel the magnetic pull. If New York says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” then San Francisco says, “Give me your rejected, your outcasts, your oppressed masses yearning to be who they are and love who they want.” It’s a deep rooted culture that permeates the air here: be who you please, wear what you want, choose your life. If the outcasts flock to New York to blend in and not be noticed, they come here to flaunt and be celebrated. No one is hiding here, no one is disappearing into the crowd. There’s too much pride in this NorCal air for that.
So now I can say hello to a new chapter. A new home. And all of you new subscribers, too (I’m so glad you’re here). This newsletter started as a place for me to tell people what to read, watch, cook, who to follow—and a place for me to share all my very personal, very me, sometimes weird, ways I try to live a low-waste life. I think it can be still be that, since I still love telling people what to do. But I’ve realized, since migrating to Substack, how much I enjoy just having a place to write whatever it is I want to write. So I guess what I’m saying is hello and thank you for being here, whatever here ends up being.
xx,
Cris, your older sister
Amazing read, thank you!!!
I love reading anything you write, keep it coming! 💜