One year ago today we woke up in a cabin at Cobble Mountain Lodge in Lake PLacid, bundled ourselves, three cats and one small Nuyorican dog into the Pathfinder and drove to our lawyer's office to sign papers and hand over one big check to buy this house. Then we drove back here and in an hour the hired guys from Brooklyn turned into the driveway with their huge rented truck and unloaded all our belongings into this big beautiful house. Most of what we owned was in cardboard boxes that they placed in the garage, several rows of stacks of boxes higher than my head. How did we arrive here with all that stuff when we had lived in a cramped apartment? My mother and Sally loaded us up with mathems, and in the coming weeks it was like opening presents to unpack some of the boxes and see what we had been given.

A week later Liza, Dave and the kids visited for a week, helping us settle in.