It came when my mother passed by a vacant building in northwest Connecticut. Once a boarding school in a bucolic country village, the brick house and stucco barn had long stood empty on a slim plot of land. To anyone else, it would have looked like an endless headache without much garden, but to my parents it was endless possibility. Through a series of too-good-to-be-true coincidences, it came into our family’s possession, and this compound has become the most landmark of our family, an ode to our eccentricities and to our bonds, which are packed as tight as we were in that loft on lower Broadway.
I grew up and I did, in fact, move out, but I didn’t keep my promise to myself to find a solid base. I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, back to Manhattan, back to Brooklyn, to another place in Brooklyn, to another place in Brooklyn, then back to Manhattan to an apartment I loved, and then into another that I never saw when the pandemic kept me on a whole different continent for nearly a year. I didn’t understand, back then, that we don’t just move because we’re looking for something better. We move because life happens, in ways both heartbreaking and mundane. Sometimes it’s noisy neighbors, sometimes it’s crippling heartbreak, and sometimes it’s because the rent is too damned high.
Still, I wanted permanence, a sense that I lived in a monument—if not to the family I hadn’t yet made, then to the one that had made me. And so, my family undertook their most maddening real estate project yet: building my house in their Connecticut backyard.
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It was a veritable Suicide Squad of characters: our friend and longtime architect David Bers, a subtle genius with swagger to spare; Rick McCue, the contractor of few words but many skills who had brought all our other Connecticut dreams to fruition; my father, himself an aesthetic with his own way of doing things, working with David and Rick to project-manage; my mother, using her passion for color, texture, and—as she calls them—objects. And me, pulling up the rear, aka sending helpful texts like “CAN WE PAINT THE HOUSE PINK AND ADD CIRCULAR WINDOWS SO IT LOOKS LIKE I LIVE IN A STRAWBERRY!?” (The answer was a firm no.)