Finding Our Place
From city to country, five years in — and counting.
I’ll never forget driving up our little mountain road for the first time.
It was late summer, what has become by far my favorite time of year up here. Just an hour’s drive out of the city we turned onto a dirt road that circled up, up, up. Trees growing up into a canopy of green over our heads, it was like an enchanted forest — I was entranced, looking for fairies.
It was 2020 and we’d been on a house hunt for months. Our Brooklyn abode, while large enough for city standards and even boasting the luxury of outdoor space, was something I could no longer tolerate.
We’d married on March 7th — for those good with dates, the last weekend before the world ended, and who could have predicted, yet we’d partied as if we knew (getting married in New Orleans will do that for you)!
No, the pandemic was hard for all, but those of us who lived in the city know what I’m talking about. Suddenly I craved more space, nature, it was a lifeline I was desperate for.
The market was a wreck at the time. We thought, maybe we’ll buy something in Westchester, maybe this is what we would have done anyway in a few (five?) years time, who knows?
Everything was grossly overpriced, and also just… gross? The rental market even worse. So imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon this Zillow listing, for this gorgeous country property in a town called Garrison… hey, isn’t that where we rented that sweet Airbnb for the weekend some years ago?
Fully-furnished? And not absurdly overpriced? Too good to be true, must be.
And walking into this house, I just felt it immediately. I saw us here. I saw myself at that vintage six-burner Viking range, Jared lighting a fire in the next room. I saw our life unfolding, and I knew it would be ours.
Yet never could I have pictured just how rich our lives would become in this house.
I had been trying to get pregnant, as one does after their wedding, and found myself with child — my first cycle in.
It feels bittersweet even now to write about it, to think about it… because it has been so good to us, this house. And having now raised two babies here, I will forever feel attached to it. There is just so much magic here, and like all things it has its faults and flaws, but it really has been perfect for us over these last five years.
Five years! How it flies.
We always knew it wasn’t permanent, by its very nature of being a rental, after all. At that moment back in 2020, we knew nothing of where life would land. We knew only that we were escaping the city to the country for a bit, Jared not knowing when or if he’d need to be back in the city, it all just felt very TBD.
I’ll tell you now about this little town. Maybe you too are a city mouse who has always been curious about a move to the country? Here’s what I can share.
Well, country being an important distinction… I myself feel nearly allergic to the suburbs, I do apologize if that comes off as offensive, but let me follow it up with this: we may indeed, by my own choice (!) be making a move to what is at least a more suburban area in the near(-ish?) future. More on that in a bit.
If you’ve never heard of Garrison, it shares township with Cold Spring, which may be more familiar. Cold Spring has a little town and Main Street, with a lot of the quaint shops and feelings of a Hallmark movie. There’s lots of great hiking around, the autumns are devastatingly gorgeous, and most notably IMHO is that it’s just an hour from the city! If you’re not familiar with the city’s surrounding geography basically Westchester is a county with a lot of suburban towns just outside the city, and then if you keep driving just north of that, you’ll land in Garrison and then Cold Spring.
There’s not much going on here in Garrison, other than hidden homes and protected land. A place you might move to get away from it all. We did have one restaurant which has sadly closed for the winter which has left us feeling quite distraught — not to mention the name was Dolly’s (Dolly = nickname for my baby Dahlia, and this being the restaurant that fed us once a week through all these years and postpartums and babies’ first dinners out and I’m just sentimental about all of it).
I suppose this is both what I love and hate about living here: the seclusion. On the one hand living surrounded by acres of forest and nature is sublime. It’s been a dream to raise our two babies in the frequency of this land. And I stated earlier my aversion to the suburbs, I have learned that my requirements for a home and acreage can be summed up as follows: I can be naked outside in my yard if I wish, full stop. Not something I necessarily find myself doing but metaphorically, the option must exist.
And it’s the problem all the same. One restaurant — now none. It’s not enough. Boy I am lucky I like to cook, but even for me it’s just not enough. Now, there are a few restaurants in Cold Spring… but not really. In truth there is one restaurant I like and I’m currently a bit sour on them after they turned us away on a date night post-chamber concert at 9:19pm.
The little town in Cold Spring, while charming to be sure, leaves something to be desired. Most of the purveyors just don’t have the same taste level as those in other Hudson Valley towns like Hudson or Kingston. I feel guilty saying it, I don’t like to speak unkindly or negatively when not necessary but it’s just been my experience if I’m being honest. (Except here I must shout out two exceptions to that rule, my lovely friend Judiann’s fabulous vintage shop DamnAged and lovely Eliza’s most perfect wine shop, Flowercup!)
We don’t have a great grocery store situation (a very mediocre and oddly overpriced Foodtown) but we do have a wonderful butcher and fishmonger, only problem for me is that these are both about 22 minutes away which isn’t horrible but also, especially with children (including a baby who one year in still screams for approximately 80% of every car ride) in tow, is less than ideal.
But the children, my baby girls — this is the other positively fruitful part about living here, what it’s meant for them. We were so lucky to have the most extraordinary Montessori school for Violet, and now it’s part of the reason I think it might not be so bad to stay a little while longer, for Dahlia is set (somehow!? I truly can’t understand how) to attend next fall.
And Violet is now at a lovely (stone!) public school that feels private due to the size and care (the warmest, most loving people!) — she is thriving! And going back to the Hallmark vibes, it really is the cutest community with the cutest little community events, a place where your kid can run around and get a lost for a moment and you’re not even worried.
(I haven’t actually lost my children but did literally witness my friend’s husband lose one at a summer event last year, she was discovered rather quickly and we all joked through crooked smiles that if we were to lose a child this would be the place to do it — I never told the mom, would you have??)
My husband feels the seclusion problem more deeply than I do, mostly because as a mom it has been easier for me to make friends and doubly hastened by the fact that he is a bit of a workaholic so naturally doesn’t have as much time to devote to being social.
But largely I would say that the issue is also the result of the smallness of this place. I googled our population out of curiosity the other day and discovered the combined total for Garrison and Cold Spring to be around 6k, and for comparison’s sake I’ll give you the population for the area we’re planning to move which is also small in my mind but nevertheless clocking in at 23k. That’s a lot more folks.
So we’ll be taking our talents back down to Westchester, it looks like at least, for nothing can ever be certain, but that is the plan. And it’s excited me endlessly, simply having a plan, to feel we belong somewhere, because for years nothing seemed to feel right.
And the odd thing is I’ve had this same conversation with others in our age group, all looking for something, a perfect fit for their family, and not really feeling it. The even odder thing is that the place we’re looking at now is the same one we considered at the beginning, and not much about it has changed in between all this time — so why does it feel right now?
Timing. The great mystery. We grow and evolve and gradually, things fall into form.
It’s not a big secret, so I don’t mean to make it seem as such: “the place” is the Bedford/Pound Ridge area, and let me explain now what I love about it: it is similar to where we are now, in all the ways that I love… you can live on a big plot of land, surrounded by nature, with privacy. Maybe just a bit more manicured, in a good way. It still feels like a quaint, small town and yet there are a few more restaurants… more things to do with the girls, more options for dance classes and the like… a Whole Foods! And perhaps most importantly, it’s looking like my sister-in-law and her family will be moving to a neighboring town (each of our two children 5 days and 3 weeks apart, respectively).
We considered Westport/Weston for a bit, but that began to feel like just a bit too much for me. (I’m getting the vision of the three bears here, Garrison being too small, Westport being too big, and Bedford feeling juuuuust right.) My husband grew up in Roslyn, which some may describe as intense, and we didn’t really want that. You know everyone says you can find your people anywhere, and I know this is true, but I also think there is a general energy of a place, and that one just didn’t feel like us.
Yes, we’re all looking for that perfect fit, and maybe that’s the problem? If I had to design my most perfect place, maybe… Laurel Canyon? Well, maybe that’s the closest, but then there are still problems with it. My husband loves Santa Monica but see we don’t want to move to the other coast, away from his family. Without parents of my own I don’t feel this same pull but of course I want to remain near to them, for the girls and they are my family now, too. And then there are the fires, and just the general indescribable difference between east coast and west coast personality.
Nothing can be entirely perfect, so you have to hone in on the things that feel most important to you.
People have asked, of course, would we ever move back to the city? I would have preferred the city for the newborn phase (don’t recommend this in a secluded home at the top of a mountain) but that’s about it. Now I appreciate our visits and even more, I appreciate our returns home. I also feel we’d need to be in an outlandish income bracket to make it feel enjoyable, and even then I’m not sure I’d want my kids growing up that way.
And now that I’m writing this all out, you know what it is? It’s wholesomeness. That’s what I crave for my family. That’s why we’d never move to Florida (though we surely thought of it, in fact I may be thinking of it this very moment 🥶) and that’s why the city, while it has much to offer, doesn’t feel like us. I crave a wholesome life for them, for us, one where we have a big yard and a garden and yes, one we can tend to naked if we feel like it.
Seasons! A major reason to stay in the northeast, and to stay near the city also feels right — to have access to the capital of culture and the arts, just an hour’s drive away. Nothing is perfect, but this feels pretty close, to me.
More than anything, I crave my forever home… my forever kitchen — oh, it will be grand — the center of our home in every way. Zillow isn’t giving me much these days, but I stay, ha! let’s just call it, very attuned.
Sometimes we wonder, would we ever build a home? Anything’s possible. For now, I feel lucky to simply know what I want, to be here now, in this beautiful 100-year-old house that may not be mine, and surely doesn’t have as much kitchen space as I’d like — but it does offer us this precious luxury, to be able to wait, for our own forever home. And while nothing is perfect, I know this one will be perfect for us.
One day.
x Sarah