From New York to Ann Arbor via Covid

On re-building a life and business in the hometown I never thought I'd live in again

I promised myself I’d post something, anything, on my Substack by the end of January. But in keeping with my desire to create structure without piling on the guilt, February is the new January. That seems about right. It’s been about two years since my first and only two posts here, two pieces of writing I somehow managed to wrestle out of myself in the weeks before we left New York in the spring of 2021, unsure of where we’d end up. A toddler and two cats in tow, a business to restart, a life to rebuild. A life contained to an absurdly small storage unit until we figured out a plan.

Ann Arbor, Michigan is where we ended up. My hometown, the place where my wingman and I met in our early twenties and then left soon after, the whole country our oyster. Over two decades together we've lived in nearly all the places — the southwest, the northern midwest, the pacific northwest, the south, and finally the northeast where we thought we were going to stay for good in the house we were trying to buy right when the world shut down. The pandemic evaporated our plans and took our future down with it, as it did with so many people.

I’d become a savvy, flexible traveler in our years living around the country and those skills, coupled with the limberness and resilience required of being a small business owner, helped immensely as we began to rebuild our life from scratch. We became good at riding the waves, of knowing when to surrender and when to keep going. We kept going. There was beauty but it was exhausting. For a while I forgot what it was like to look forward to something. To think big and dream big. Survival mode doesn’t leave a lot of room for fluff. 

But the fluff is where it’s at. The fluff is the good stuff, the fun stuff — the heated floors, seat warmers, fingerless gloves — can you tell it’s winter in Michigan and I’m cold? Life isn’t nearly as fun without the deep desire to cook, or knit, or write or take photos. When the scales are tipped to business, pleasure left behind. These past few years I’ve had to put some things aside in order to survive, but survive I have, and a beautiful life emerged. The desire for all the things came back simultaneously — to cook, write, photograph, collaborate — and this newsletter is my outlet for them. 

I love cookbooks and I have sixteen of them that I’m going to cook out of for the year, give the rest of the collection a break. I want to write about that so I will, here. And I love to take photographs. I just went to Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn and I took so many photos that I love, so I’ll post those here too. I like to write and at certain points in my life I’ve called myself a writer, I’m hoping to make this point in my life one of those times. I own a woodworking business with my husband. To own a small business in America through the pandemic is a wild ride, I have some thoughts about it. 

I’ll be posting something, someday, each week. I hope you’ll join me. Thanks for reading this far.