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Day Three, Four and Five: August 17, 18, 19

Although it reportedly rains 200 days a year in Seattle, this city is rich with one fundamental amenity that San Francisco lacks: outdoor cafes. I've never understood why San Francisco and New York, America's two greatest cities, are so stingy with affording cafe society, the flaneurs, a locus. In Rome, Paris, even London, the smallest restaurant or tabac has at least a few tables and the avenues are strewn with rattan bistro chairs in which one is meant to idle away watching the passing parade, admiring and commenting upon the human tapestry that makes urban living so satisfying.

Once we left Mendocino we slipped back into our ritual of trying on each new place like a shoe. We don't just visit, we window shop lives, wondering if perhaps we should settle in and never leave. Both Portland and Seattle seem feasible options as we sit in cafes and observe the cities' rhythm and people. If I had it to do over again I could easily imagine launching my life in either city. Both seem, these days at least, particularly amenable to raising kids -- babies in slings abound. Both seem to afford a quality of life that we take to and the East lacks: a casual sophistication, manageable weather, a permeating sense of nature, fresh foods, a commitment to coffee and savoring it in the aforementioned cafes and, most importantly, a bit less climbing on one another's faces to get a piece of some presumably limited commodity -- attention, power, money, apartments, whatever.

Of course these are just superficial, passing-through observations -- it would take much longer to really understand these towns and we would stay for months if we could. We arrived in Portland after a rocky night in a horrible Best Western in Crescent City, the northern most outpost on the California Coast. The drive into Oregon was slow and circuitous, through the lovely Redwood State Park, affording us our first glimpse of massive pine trees and a gorgeous river gorge. We'd stopped on Avenue of the Giants the day before and hugged the largest redwood tree, but that terrain felt familiar, having lived near Muir Woods and camped amongst the chilly redwoods at Big Basin State Park south of San Francisco. But serpentining through the proverbial towering pines, we knew we were finally somewhere else.

In Portland we encountered what we had feared would be the peril of our first summer-time road trip: no room at the inn. We finally got a referral to a university-owned hotel and snared a noisy cement-halled room. We went out for a late bite only to discover Portland's peculiar Achilles heel: Minors are not permitted to enter a restaurant that serves liquor after 10:00pm. Of course, all that is open after 10:00pm are places that serve liquor. Exhausted, starving and frustrated we convinced a friendly bar-keep to give us some take-out. But generally we were impressed as we drove around Portland's Pearl district, with its lively gentrified warehouses, lofts and 50 chic home furnishing stores.

We encountered what was for us the best of Portland when we went to the "alternative" Hawthorne district for breakfast at The Cup and Saucer Cafe. The eerie sense that we had walked into Berkeley circa 1980 -- the tree-lined bungalow streets, the re-sale shops, tattoos and Birkenstocks -- was confirmed by a clerk in the Powell's bookstore. She moved here 7 years ago because it reminded her so much of the Berkeley where she grew up: a friendly, progressive small town within a city.

We shopped and strolled after breakfast and arrived in Seattle at 5:00pm and finding a room seemed nearly hopeless. Confident that, if it came to it, we could go out to the highway and drive till we stumbled on a suburban Best Western, we sat parked in a bus stop with Burt, Megan and I all on cell phones calling hotels. Burt got a line on a university-owned facility on the U-Wash campus and it turned out to be the score of the week: the Talaris Conference center in an 18-acre park, complete with willow trees and pond. There were no conferences this weekend and we could have a room, beyond our budget but also exceeding our expectations. We can handle the Best Western barracks of the road, but it makes the joy of smooth, unstained sheets, lush absorbent towels and real polished chrome sink faucets all that more profound. We nearly kissed the wool wall-to-wall.

We stayed at Talaris, home to the Seattle Midwifery School, two nights. This gave us a day to explore Seattle's neighborhoods. We barely took on downtown, preferring a glimpse of daily life in Fremont, home of two folksy sculptures: a huge Volkswagen-eating troll and larger-than-life Vladimir Lenin, and in Ballard, home of the Archie McPhee store and charming blocks with industrial brick storefronts and proud citizens conducting a Free Ballard campaign to loosen the chains of imperialist Seattle. When it doesn't rain here the weather seems remarkable: the air is a perfect, humidity-free 74, last night a bright full moon hung over Puget Sound.

In San Francisco's defense, despite its dearth of cafes, the one thing it has over every other city we've seen is a kind of clean, crisp, compact beauty unencumbered by the rings of industry, highway, construction cranes, power plants, high rises and cement ramps that interrupt the approaches and sight lines of most cities. Seattle and Portland have lovely waterfronts but nothing as serene and Oz-like as San Francisco's. In Seattle, bursting highways crisscross the landscape delivering constant traffic jams, and in Portland it seems as if too many bridges encumber the waterway. As we count the advantages these less expensive, inviting cities afford, we appreciate all over again how lucky we were to find ourselves in San Francisco and how deeply we love that place.

Although we had our first good meal here -- wild boar and grilled pear ravioli (!) at half the price of comparable food in New York or SF, this is still not a happy or care free trip. The tension is thick, the sleep is short, we have yet to find a rhythm. Our car is over-filled with stuff that threatens to cascade onto the ground each time we lift the back to seek out a bottle of water or rifle for a jacket, re-packing is a squabbling Rubik's cube challenge every morning. Our hearts are still heavy and the shadow of anxiety about money and housing and the future seems to hang about us like Pigpen's private swirl of dust.

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Day Six: August 20

We had hoped to make Vancouver today but an hour on the phone revealed that finding a bed in a new city and a new country might best not be done on the fly. We were able to book a place for tomorrow only, so we are staying on at Talaris, our new little idle, for a rest day to wash our clothes, re-organize the car and lay off some ballast at UPS. I was so tired this afternoon after hours in the mall looking for Canadian guidebooks and maps that I succumbed to a $2.00 burger at Dick's Drive-In. But earlier in the day we wandered into a Saturday farmers market and grazed --eating artisan bread samples and spearing tiny cubes of local cheese with toothpicks. Although badgered by the sense that we should be doing and seeing things and maximizing our limited time here, the transitory scent of basil, flowers and cantaloupe in the market was grounding.

The biggest challenge of road trips (aside from finding beds and meals) is how to keep moving and yet slow down, the push to maintain momentum and get somewhere, and the opposing pull to be present, to freeze and be where we are.

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Day Seven: August 21

Driving into Vancouver from the outlying residential districts is like encountering a 1950's vision of the future. Suddenly in the distance a cluster of huge, glittering cylinders appears on the horizon. The city is like Tokyo meets upstate New York. Everywhere looming residential high-rises, many of them rounded, colored in muted pastels and covered in metal clad windows, shoot forth with glitzy, yet somehow dated determination. But on the ground we had difficulty finding a center. We saw little evidence of that 19th century world-weary, old brick and cracked sidewalk, factory and sewing shop memory of the industrial age that grounds and gives grit to most North American cities.

As always we spent hours driving every nook and cranny in an effort to grasp the whole. We circled the crowded Stanley Park on Sunday, where a festival of India was a reassuring sign of energy and cultural diversity. But in general we could not find a point of connection. We had anticipated a sort of west coast optimism coupled with European sophistication. We have heard so much hype about Vancouver being the happening city, the up and coming creative, digital, and cultural center of the west. But most of the business and shopping districts were cluttered with New York (on Broadway or 42nd street) style cheesy commercialism, ice cream plus Subway. Of course it was an August Sunday so the streets were filled with tourists from around the world in shorts and flip flops eating pizza slices, but it seemed to us the most informal of cities -- no reason to put on the dress-up, try to look chic clothes we were keeping in our roof top carrier for urban interludes.

Our room in The Hampton Inn offered the bizarre first impression that may have colored our experience. The window of our 12th floor room was entirely filled with moonscape: the top of the giant white quilted bubble that covers the Vancouver Center, an event arena on the waterfront. In the morning we were astonished to see a tiny figure slowly scaling the surface, as if weightless, taking gingerly giant steps across a steroidal helium balloon.

From the roof deck of the Hotel, I counted a dozen cranes in various stages of activity, one precariously lifting a port-a-potty to the heavens, and at least two dozen of the aqua tinted, new-ish cylindrical towers. The books laud the city's model urban planning, and indeed each neighborhood is carefully identified with logo flags on the light posts.

We had dinner at "the oldest vegetarian restaurant in Vancouver" out in the "Kits" district, an area we sought out for it's alleged alternative flavor (you can tell by the psychedelic logo flags). The wait was slow and confused; the food was satisfying as only tofu, brown rice, cauliflower and peanut sauce can be. This experience was just as advertised.

We popped over to Granville Island -- an artsy, touristy destination with red steel roofed buildings housing galleries, craft shops and so on. It is undoubtedly enjoyable to spend time on the water in Vancouver, and it is lovely for people with boats or living with water views. But the much-touted Granville Island felt created, pleasantly homogenized, and a bit unreal to us. It being Sunday night there was no theater to see or galleries open so we didn't get to give it a fair shake I suppose. Nevertheless, we returned to our bubble-view room, passing through the hotel's redundant security systems (card in the door, card in the elevator, card in the door) unsure whether we were missing something or whether something was missing.

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Day Eight: August 22

Our first night in Vancouver I dreamt about the totem house poles at the University of British Columbia Anthropology Museum. I didn't realize that was what my dream had been about until I saw the poles for the first time when we visited the museum the next day.

These totem house poles, giant tree trunks elaborately carved with images of animals and people, were used as structural posts and beams in homes built by the aboriginal peoples of the pacific northwest. Frequently a pair of door poles stood at the entry to a house. These homes, with their personalized, protective totems, were passed down through generations, carrying on family, tradition and lineage.

I was stunned with recognition when I saw the poles and recalled my dream of the previous night. In the dream my home, a typical dream amalgam of several homes I've lived in, was being renovated by the landlord, the front door moved to a different side of the house and the porch ripped off. We were still living in the house and horrified that this assault was occurring unannounced around us. The house began to cave in and the essential structure, consisting of a pair of huge, dramatic, raw tree trunks -- large poles holding up the ceiling, began to topple, as if in slow motion, bringing down the roof and collapsing the floor.

Reading about these powerful first people's dwellings in the museum, I was particularly struck by the idea that these shelters where potlatches and family gatherings had occurred for generations, were considered fundamental, profoundly important, their preservation and ownership essential to familial security and honoring of ancestors. It is only natural, and more than a bit spooky, that I would dream about the structure of my family home, revealed to be as strong and grounded as tree trunks, being violated. In this glimpse of aboriginal culture I felt validated in how others have treasured and attached themselves to homes, not really the norm in our transient, disconnected culture where the average person moves every 5 years.

This was my second seemingly prescient dream of the trip. The night after our stay in Mendocino I dreamed that we fell off the cliffs into the water, that Nell went under, that I could see her but couldn't penetrate the water with my hands, although finally I did break through the glassine surface, lift her out and save her. I learned the next day that a couple had driven off the cliffs into the ocean right near our hotel on the day of my dream.

I have had one undeniably prescient dream in my life -- I dreamt about planes falling from the sky, businessmen with briefcases running from a massive ensuing fire, on September 10, 2001. I woke up in terror from that dream around 6:00am on September 11th and since that time have had to consider the possibility that psychic phenomenon of some kind does exist, though I remain skeptical and baffled that these moments are so rare and random and inexplicable.

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A night in Hope is precisely what we needed. Leaving the museum we exited the city's residential ring and after passing the malls, the Fed Ex stores and Ikea, one quickly enters relatively rural areas. The small town we reached at dusk was called Hope, British Columbia. A cross-roads for campers, truckers and skiers headed for the mountains, Hope is on a river and has some fast food, a pawn shop and a craft gallery; an incongruously well manicured park; a slew of low budget motels; a campground; houses with barking dogs, broken down cars and eyes peering out the windows; and our favorite spot, the Skagit Motor Inn. We were drawn to the neon sign with the giant arrow, and the cottage style single story buildings with Adirondack like benches in front of each cheerfully shingled room.

The guidebook said that the locals like to enjoy big slices of Cherry pie at the Home restaurant on the highway, and that's precisely what we did, all Twin Peaks style.

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Day Nine: August 23

Forgoing Hope, we climb to glacial waters. A dramatic mountainous drive takes us finally into darkness surrounded by looming snow-covered peaks. We tried a few towns enroute to sleep, but could find nothing suitable. So we pushed on, like we do, and ended up in a bit more rugged terrain with a bit less light than we would have liked. But it wasn't completely dark until we arrived, tense and tired, in the small resort town of Lake Louise and pulled into the first hotel we saw.

The darkening vistas were awesome, quite startling to see so much snow in August, so much cold -- the temperate dropping to a very damp 42.

The hotel was attractive from the outside but built of cardboard, noisy and inhospitable to sleep. Awaked by loud footsteps above at dawn the next morning, I pulled on a fleece over my slept-in-t-shirt, slipped out the door and headed out in search of an ATM to change money for coffee. No ATM's in Lake Louise take Visa, I paid the hotel manager a fifty-cent fee to change five dollars and bought a double cappuccino ("Seattle's best coffee sold here") at the deli.

I'm rarely up and out in the early morning and appreciated the elite quiet afforded to those who are about before everyone else. It was very cold and drizzly but I could see the snowy peaks and took a walk by a beautiful aqua rushing river, drinking in the sound and wishing I could live in this faux Switzerland for a while by this rushing river, lost in the sound of melting ice pouring over ageless stone.

I drove over to the Lake and by 9:00am it was already host to sputtering buses disgorging scores of Japanese tourists, caravanning Canadians and British hikers with walking sticks and many-pocketed hiking shorts in 45-degree drizzle. But the Lake was stunning, you sense something magic about a crystal, aqua, mirrored surface so high up, cradled in the space between grand, ancient mountains encrusted with snow and ice. In the bustle of tour guides and flash bulbs, I caught a glimpse of the profound peace this spot must have brought its first solitary visitors.

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Day Ten: August 24

There are times on a road trip when all you can do is clutch the seat, stare straight into the glare of on-coming trucks and think about how absurd it would be to die in a head-on collision on a dark, winding, two-lane mountain road in the rain in the middle of you have no idea where. It's 40 miles to the next town, pitch black, no lights or cars in sight, just the occasional "range cattle" sign, the whipping wind, and the sudden monster truck blasting you with a blinding wall of water.

This was not the plan; it is never the plan. We had planned to stay a second night in Lake Louise. But it was raining, freezing cold and cloudy. After looking at the lake, driving the lovely Bow Trail Highway and checking out Banff (faux ski town full of shops with bored teenagers dipping apples and popcorn into vats of caramel) we were inclined to continue south in search of summer -- we hadn't bargained on fleece and frozen toes in August.

We made such great time, crossing the Canadian border in daylight (secure in the knowledge that we are not on a government list for now), pulling into the Saint Mary's Resort at the doorway to Glacier National Park for a late sunset; it could have been perfect. The skies were clearing; there was a cowboy on horseback, a funky cafe with pie, and all things American. We were even in time for the infamous steaks at the Supper Club. Except that the huge St. Mary's Resort was full. And the company that operates all the other facilities in the park was closed at 7:00, and the closest hotel was back in Canada or forward, on reservation lands south of the park (you wouldn't want to stay there, the hotel clerk said cryptically, it's the kind of place to just stop for gas and keep going.) We headed down the mountain, exhausted but with the knowledge that there was a motel with a room down there somewhere. That's when we got in trouble, that's when we crossed the path of lazy cattle, and a puffed up skunk, a three-legged dog and me gasping slow down, slow down, slow down as we serpentined the switch-back turns along the park edge into the dark and foggy night.

But here I am 90 minutes of two-lane blacktop later in the tacky but clean and surprisingly comfortable Gateway Plaza Motel. Straggling in at 10:30, shouldering through sheets of freezing rain, we tried not to stare at the ghostly, gray-haired, vacant-eyed woman wandering the empty florescent lobby, extracting treasures out of the trashcans.

Sometimes it's just a relief to be alive, and in a room with floral covered queen beds, plastic flowers and a Mr. Coffee.

Addendum: the next morning I discovered in the guidebooks that Cut Bank Montana, where we spent the night, is, according to the 27-foot penguin statue in front of the sister hotel across the street from the one where we slept, "the coldest place in America". Our host, affable Eric, transplanted here recently from Minnesota, reports that it gets to 40 below in the winter but, nonetheless he's had four offers from investors from places like California to buy the hotel and he's not leaving. He likes it in Cut Bank. His two adorable kids run through the lobby in the morning draped in blankets with a cardboard box over their heads, train fashion. There are more trains whistling and rumbling through Montana than anyplace I have ever been.

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Day Eleven: August 25

It's not that we are cheap, but we're broke, in a hurry and judgmental, so thus far there have been several places we have stopped at but left, balking at the admission charges. It seems insane to drive hundreds and hundreds of miles to someplace you'll probably never return to and then skip its attractions to save twenty bucks, but there it is.

First, there was the Experience Music Project in Seattle, Paul Allen's giant techno-museo-shrine to Jimi Hendrix supposed-to-be-awesome-and-participatory museum where "you get to be a digital simulated rock star!" At twenty bucks a person, balking is inevitable. Nell, our resident real musician, wasn't especially interested, saying that it sounded like something only people who don't actually play music would enjoy.

Then we were accosted by a surprise check for Canadian National Park passes at Lake Louise. We couldn't bring ourselves to cough up sixteen bucks (I had already stopped by the lake in the morning and the rest of the group just wanted to take a peek, it was raining after all) so we surreptitiously pulled into an upper parking lot and I sat in the car while the others took fifteen minutes and ogled the glacial splendor. Or, as Megan likes to say, we totally crashed Lake Louise.

So, when we finally wound our way back from Cut Bank to Browning, repeating part of our late night drive through the Blackfoot reservation in Technicolor daytime yellow and blue (yellow fields and dogs, blue sky) we spun by the Indian museum but balked at $16 to the Department of the Interior for 20 minutes in a small brick building. Instead we pulled into a small Indian gallery and B&B, "Lodgepole Gallery and Tipi Village'' where artist Darrell "Grows Like Buffalo" Norman was crafting an abstract sculpture of a buffalo with a drum, modern tribal music was playing and the view of the plains was stunning from the ground level windows. Had there not been a freezing wind across the fields already at mid-day, we would have taken on the adventure of staying in one of the tipis (owned by the artist, who has a degree in "professional sales", and his German wife Angelica) to experience the Big Sky at night and cornmeal cakes in the morning.

With me at the wheel (although he usually prefers to drive, Burt was angry cause I asked him to slow down one too many times), we traversed a fairly scenic drive west along the base of Glacier National Park. We stopped in the park for our trip's first foray into nature and spent a pleasant hour by 10-mile long Lake McDonald, skipping stones and admiring the mountains, wishing we could stay the night but all the park facilities were full.

At the boat launch on the Lake I chatted with an attractive, sun-glassed young man enroute from Chicago to Atlanta to open up a new Trader Joe's store. He proudly relayed that his company had finally penetrated the New York market after 6 years of trying because NYU polled it's students as to what store they'd like to see in the school's new building and they all choose Trader Joe's! Life is good in America where apparently even the youth, our most prized consumers, covet discount wine and vats of olive oil.

Heading on to Whitefish Lake, watching for a place to stay, we stumbled upon The North Forty Resort, a dozen attractive log cabins. Over our budget but, once again, enticed by down comforters and our own little porch and barbecue, we succumbed to an evening's rest. We drove to Whitefish and briefly watched the sunset on a small local beach hauntingly reminiscent of Long Beach Sag Harbor. In front of us teens cavorted, girls tossing their hair, boys bitterly lamenting the start of school this week and a boisterous 12-year-old tossed himself vigorously into two feet of water over the over again, trying to entice his balking lab puppy into the spray. In the parking lot a gaggle of bikers puffed and postured, rubbing their chrome and blasé-ly tossing down a beer.

We blew through the Safeway and by 10:00pm were finally eating grilled vegetables and steak like real people living real lives and I was a bit glad to be missing summer in Sag Harbor, to be, as Nell put it, nostalgic for the place I'm going to, not just the place I'm leaving.

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Day Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen: August 27, 28, 29

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Day Eighteen & Nineteen: September 1 & 2

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Day Twenty: September 3

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Day Twenty One: September 4

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Day Twenty Four: September 7

Middle childhood may be the time I remember best. Memories of toddler-hood and preschool number a handful, and the teen years are sometimes best forgotten. But moments of being eight and ten and eleven are frozen in my minds eye, suspended. Maybe these images remain clear because my middle childhood was tucked neatly into one near bucolic town, a snapshot of a town, a place made to order for childhood snapshots. We lived in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey from the first week of first grade (one bookend) until the June I completed sixth grade (the other bookend) when we left for Connecticut with Jr. high and adolescence and all that messiness on the horizon. Mountain Lakes is a place created solely for parents and kids, a small town with five lakes, four small public schools and large homes full of bedrooms strewn with gym shorts and leotards (on the floor these days it's probably ipods and pink cell phones sporting chatty text messages). It was a town you could navigate on your bike, a town where everyone walked to school. I don't recall a business or commercial center to speak of, no visible apartments or retirement homes or condos, this is an upper-middle-class residential oasis dominated by playing fields and the beach and tennis club and four churches.

So, as Phanny trucked through Pennsylvania and descended perilously close to the New York area, I lobbied for a brief detour through my hometown (a place I don't recall having seen since I was 12, although Burt says we drove through there once 30 years ago). We found the exit pretty easily and I immediately recognized the main drag, the Boulevard, with its wide bike path where I spent hours on my black English Racer. I easily found St. Peter's Church; I still have my inter-locking pins awarded for five years of perfect attendance. I directed us straight up the hill that I walked to school and right into our driveway at 10 Condit Road.

It's wearying to hear your parents talk about the past -- that's the tree where my tree house was, that's the backyard where I ran our talent shows, that's the house where my best friend lived, that's the driveway where I slipped on the ice and landed in a full split. And I have dragged my kids to my high school house and the house where I got married and the first house their Dad and I lived in. But those houses were nearly unrecognizable -- renovated, McMansioned and subdivided. Remarkably this house, the one from the longest time ago, remains virtually unchanged. The screen porch is now enclosed, the pachysandra thinned, but the black circular driveway where I rode my bike, nee horse, thousands of miles continues eternally around and around; my bedroom window remains firmly in the stucco front of the house where it has always been. No one is home, although evidence of life is everywhere -- a skateboard, a soccer net, a basketball. Since the house is empty we gingerly peek in the windows, greeted by a tail-wagging lab, and I point out the stairway landing where my piano sat, the living room that was filled with my white canopy bed one Christmas morning.

As we return to the Jersey Turnpike and breach the final 150 miles back to our future in Sag Harbor, I am in a bit of a daze, having passed through a world that lives in my dreams, having touched a spectral reality; doin' the time warp again.

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Epilogue

We arrived in Sag Harbor two weeks ago and the move in has been nearly as exhausting and exasperating as the move out of San Francisco. Dumping the contents of a large household of four who all work at home into a very, very small already fully furnished house with three closets and no basement or garage is stupidly mind-boggling. I feel guilty and superficial to be so overwhelmed by "stuff and things" (as the girls like to say).

As I unloaded my San Francisco bedroom on top of my Sag Harbor bedroom last night, creating archeological dig style layers, I realized my malaise is not simply because I am excessively materialistic. My deep sense of place is askew, my soul disoriented. I miss and cling to my San Francisco identity while seeking mightily to reconnect with my long-beloved East End and to find a vision of a satisfying, stimulating future here.

For fifteen years I have struggled with a split life, dividing our time between San Francisco and Sag Harbor. Moving twice a year between our East Coast and West Coast friends and routines and spaces was always too complicated and we could never really explain why we kept doing it: dealing with dozens of impossible tenants and hundreds of UPS shipments (in the early years it was cribs and toys, then guitars and easels and books); fighting with phone companies, landlords and cable TV monopolies; losing mail and severing commitment to any on-going involvements in either community; enduring months of annual displacement and re-orientation. Yet now reducing to one home seems completely false -- I tell people we finally live here full time, I go through the motions, but it doesn't seem real or possible. It seems too late for that.

And the truth is, as the glorious East End became increasingly crowded, overrun with aggressive scenesters and in-your-face wealth, we had come to prefer San Francisco without even realizing it. I always maintained that if forced into domicidal monogamy I'd choose Sag Harbor without hesitation -- San Francisco was the affair, Sag Harbor, a place I've been connected to since I was 25, was always the marriage. But I discovered this past year how much I thrive on the sunny youth and vitality of arm candy California.

Unfortunately, the mistress kicked us out and the spouse requires maintenance. All of this is amplified by an underlying meme of financial insecurity. There could be no worse time in our lives to be handing nearly $10,000 to moving companies and storage spaces.

And all 1300 square feet of the Sag Harbor house screams for a face lift -- the floors are warped and gouged, the foundation cracked, the roof oozing ominous rust colored portents onto bedroom walls, the 23 year old windows leaky and filled with moisture, the ceilings and floors lined with spiders. Built cheaply and poorly, the house is architecturally featureless, congenitally flawed and thin. The kids, kicking shut the hollow, dented pocket doors, used to semi-fondly call it "the house of broken shit", fine for casual summers and low rent winter tenants. But it's no wonder we are worried about nesting down and settling in here for the duration.

So when Delancey Street Movers called last Monday to say they would be arriving with our 7,500 pounds 10 days early, we were neither pleased nor prepared. We spent three days emptying closets and shelves, putting furniture, piles of bedding and household goods in our domed camping tent in the yard and under huge blue tarps on the deck. Saturday four guys arrived with a giant tractor-trailer. After taking down a half-dozen tree limbs they made it only half way down the driveway and began carrying our 250 items, one by one, down the remaining 200 feet. John, who came down from Delancey's Brewster New York site (near Greenhaven prison), a tall, lanky sarcastic fellow, chided me again and again about our disparate stuff to space ratio: "Where are you going to put this! We've only got 50 more boxes, no it's 100, wait a minute, we're almost half-way done". The move went on hours longer then they expected.

Ed, the stocky, energetic driver from San Francisco was clearly irritated, a bit put upon, his white T-shirt soaked in sweat, round face and sparse buzz cut glistening in the wilting mid-day humidity. I kept offering him drinks and grateful comments, trying to cheer him up. He asked why we would leave San Francisco's weather for this and we tried to explain. By the end of the day we learned Ed was upset because he had just discovered that there was a hole in the top of the truck he had driven round the clock for five days, depositing loads in New Mexico and Nantucket on the way here. Apparently our boxes were directly under the hole and, we realized at the end of the day, had been getting rained on for days. I did wonder when several large Rubbermaid bins arrived wet and filthy. But, fortunately, the tightly piled boxes had absorbed the moisture and we found no damage to our paper and bubble-wrap cushioned possessions.

Burt stood by the moving truck for three hours, and as each box number was called out he yelled "house" or "storage". After half our stuff was formed into a cubic mountain in the center of our house, we led the 80-foot tractor-trailer five miles to Despatch's field of dreams deferred -- a half dozen long, two-story corrugated metal self-storage buildings, where we had been juggling with room sizes all week trying to determine how much space we would need to buy. John shook his head in tired disbelief when he looked at the space and appraised the 102 remaining boxes (plus misc desks, tables and file cabinets to be resurrected should our business turn around). We ended up filling two 5x10x10 rooms as planned. After another two hours of box piling we gave the crew a giant tip because we're broke and we over-identify with working too hard for a living.

That night I began a marathon session of trying to make our constipated floor space workable. I moved boxes and furniture, fashioning what Burt called a wire-frame drawing, after the layout tool digital artists use to create 3-dimensional graphics. By midnight we could sort of imagine our maze house being occupied by someone other than hungry, colliding mice.

The next day, yesterday, was Sunday and the weary double-height windows filled the tiny "great room" with astonishing, filtered crystalline September light and now that our antiques and rugs are in wedged in place it is beginning to feel warm and home-like to us.

Last night we met friends for a bonfire on the beach under a rising orange harvest moon. It's Indian summer and the crowds are thinning, a bit of quiet descending on the building sites and for sale signs studding the Hamptons  former potato fields and newly sprouted mansionettes. A neighbor tells us that Town and Country Magazine has named Sag Harbor one of the four best places to live in America. We grill farmstand vegetables instead of ordering in burritos and begin to imagine a season of reflection, braced against February winds, bundled in front of the red brick fireplace, hoping we can manage to keep paying the mortgage. Our life is not the one we had before, but whose is?

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