Last month we sold our family home in Vermont. It was something I never thought we would ever do. I envisioned keeping our wonderful home forever and giving our children parcels of the 16 acres to build their own little individually styled guest homes. I envisioned weddings and grandchildren, Christmases, and Easter egg hunts. Maybe we would build a screened-in sleeping porch down by the waterfall. Maybe we would plant fruit trees. For sure our family would have a geographically ideal plot of land should global warming continue at the pace it is now.

My magnificent view from our master bath.

Mama bear looking to borrow a cup of sugar.

The changes the world went through with Covid-19 redirected many of my visions. In a year when we found ourselves closed in our homes I looked closely at our living situations. In a year when we stopped going to stores and stopped dressing for social events, I realized we needed so much less. In a year when I was cleaning out closets, the basement, and a large storage room, I realized we just over all, in every single way, needed less than what we had. I began to think about simplifying and purging. In the spring of 2020 when we were all quarantined at home, I began to rethink how we lived. With 6 of our 7 children very far away, quarantined in their own homes… I began to change my dreams. My dreams involved going to them rather than trying to get them to Vermont.

My husband and I are very enthusiastic travelers. We love nothing more than setting out on adventures together and we were looking forward to taking our now adult children with us. I am a studied packer. I am one of those weirdos who has 225 pins saved on my Pinterest account with ideas on minimalist packing and traveling the world with a small suitcase. When we travel I love to challenge myself to bring as little as possible. I aim to blend in, feel comfortable, and travel light. I love it. I love living out of a suitcase with a neutral wardrobe and a few fab necklaces or scarves for a splash of joyful and chic colors. I do not love managing stuff and the reality is….I’m not good at it. In fact, I am actually really terrible at managing stuff. I may lack the “put it away” gene, and I am a master ostrich who would rather bury her head in the sand than clean out my closet or look under my bed. I am very good at putting things in piles to go upstairs or downstairs. I just really lack the fortitude to actually get those piles up the stairs.

Important words to think about as we went into lockdown. LOVE JOY HEALTH FAMILY FRIENDS PEACE MOTHER EARTH GRATITUDE

In the past year I have not been to any stores to buy clothes. I ordered one pair of fabulous Ugg slippers during the first month of lockdown when we arrived in snowy Vermont, I bought the most fabulous (and unfortunately expensive) Australian organic facial moisturizer, and a couple pairs of sneakers. For the past year my already owned beautiful clothes and shoes have gone unworn and my jewelry has not seen the light of day or left the safety deposit box. Why would I ever need more, when I don’t use what I have?

Little kitchen suppers when we were a small group.

My fabulous fine china collections have sat untouched. Tablecloths hanging in the closet, still in their dry cleaning bags from two years ago. My house felt more like a museum of a previous life, one we all hope to return to.

Chili dinner in the kitchen. Tulips from the Dorset Union Store brighten up the table.

In the meantime, there were certain items in our house that became the wonderfully loved treasures they deserved to be. I restarted my love affair with the kitchen equipment and utensils I had been collecting since my early twenties. We cooked glorious meals 3 times a day. I scoured my vast collection of cookbooks and we signed up for meals that were delivered to our doorstep. Hello Fresh and Marley’s Spoon arrived twice a week filled with ingredients and recipes. We learned how to make totally new meals while avoiding shopping while quarantined. We signed up with a fabulous food co-op that was gathering farm fresh food from our treasured Vermont farmers. We also found dog eared recipes and made long ago favorites. We each once again fell in love with favorite pots, we fought over favorite knives, and we dug out potato peelers, lemon squeezers, cheese graters, egg slicers, and meat thermometers. My egg poaching pan remains a favorite and I’m still waiting for my husband to fulfill a promise he made to bring back the soufflés he wooed me with when we were dating!

After driving from Florida to Vermont we quarantined and didn’t leave our house for fourteen days. Meals delivered to our doorstep helped make that possible.

Northshire Grown food boxes filled with specialities from Vermont Farms became our weekly treat!

We embraced “dressing down.” I said goodbye to “hard pants”; this phrase still makes me laugh hysterically and think of my niece Rachel, who was the first I heard use it. Sweatpants, tee shirt, and the boys’ discarded worn flannel shirts became the staples of my wardrobe. That pair of Ugg slippers became my all time favorite footwear and I wore old sweaters until they had so many holes in them that they were delegated to the precious pile of “nightgown sweaters”. (For those of you who don’t know what nightgown sweaters are…. they are fabulous old cashmere sweaters which are so old and holey yet still so wonderfully comfortable… completely inappropriate for public viewing yet absolutely wonderful over your nightgown.)

We also pulled out the games. We played games by the fire. No TV, just roaring fire, and family laughter, arguments, and smack talk. I loved every minute of it. Our youngest daughter got her fill of this time. We treasured having her and missed our older children dearly.

Frank Lloyd Wright puzzle from the wonderful Northshire Bookstore

There are only two other collections that I remained devoted to and used regularly….our library of books and my needlepoint collection. All of those design books I have been been hoarding over the years became my regular textbooks…as I studied every photo time and time again. I admired, critiqued, and learned from every square inch of each text. My needlepoint was my sanity savior. I have said this numerous times over the past many decades, there is nothing like filling in a flower, an area of background, or finishing one particular color to make you feel like you have accomplished something huge in your day. I needlepointed a great deal during 2020, finishing over 35 projects. It was my meditation and I loved every minute of it.

A belt I painted for my friend Eric Holch. I don’t usually do customs but I couldn’t resist the offer to collaborate with my favorite Nantucket artist! He designed it and I painted it for him.

As we ended a full year of living at home, our suitcases left untouched, our closets full of unworn clothes…this very important year in the history of our planet, as we coped with a global pandemic, things changed for everyone around the world. As families across the globe lost loved ones (including our own family, losing one of our most loved)…we realized we needed less, we needed less square footage to store all the things we never used, we needed less land we never walked upon. For the first time, instead of actively seeking our next adventures outside of the home…we just needed to be home. Home was safe, staying home kept others safe. We were on the team trying to help stop the spread of the virus. We needed less house, less stuff, and maybe that looked a little different than all the visions we had for so long.

A customized needlepoint pillow shows the location in which it was stitched.

So we find ourselves in a new home that checked off new boxes of things we needed and wanted, a couple thousand miles away. We have less rooms, less land, less closets, less storage areas, and less stuff. We sold two homes and the furnishings in them. We had a massive (Covid friendly) estate sale and sold all the treasures we had collected over the years. We brought with us our kitchen equipment, sweatpants, games, books, and needlepoint. There are even a few hard pants around here somewhere, which I am 99% sure I no longer fit into. We brought our favorite art, much of it made by our children. My husband brought his musical instruments and I brought my paints. Only one Ugg slipper made it in the boxes as the other has been buried in the backyard of Starlight Farm by my little furry friend. The remaining slipper will need to be disposed of soon. That’s okay, I am fairly certain I don’t need warm fuzzy slippers here amongst the palm trees.

2021 begins the year of less for us, with less material stuff and less responsibilities for stuff. With less things we don’t need….I am confident there will also be something more. What that will be, we will have to see. I will be sure to let you know!

In 1973 my widowed father married my wonderful stepmother. I was 8 at the time. My stepmother came into our lives with great love for my father, a yellow VW Bug, half a house in Vermont (which she owned with her sister and brother-in-law) and 12 new cousins for me. I’d only been to Vermont once before. And I’d only been on one ski vacation to Lake Placid before Vermont became such a huge part of our lives. I was the child of a sailing family. I knew nothing about life in the mountains. Nothing.

My mother had died a year and a half before I started skiing with my new cousins. I was the baby in my family, and then the baby in my family who lost her mother at 7. I was doted on and spoiled...by my father, my two older siblings, my grandmother, and many others....and then I wasn’t. When I joined all these new family members at this house in Vermont I was thrown into the pack. All of a sudden I was in my Lanz nightgown in an old farmhouse, bunking in the same room with all the girl cousins, waking at the crack of dawn, eating a hot breakfast I did not like, and tossed into the way back of a cold but fabulous vintage Landrover with my packed lunch and hand me down ski sweaters on the way to catch the first Okemo chairlift. And it was fun as hell. Yes, fun as hell! (For clarification purposes, it’s important to note that the “hot breakfasts I didn’t like” were lovely spreads of pancakes and eggs made by my aunt and uncle. I was Lucky Charms and Poptart girl. The issue was all mine.)

I didn’t want to take ski lessons. I’d done that for a week at Whiteface the winter before. I felt like a dork and hated being that baby in lessons. I’m a youngest child, youngest children do not like to be left in the dust by kids who know more. For some reason my parents and aunt and uncle all thought that given my aversion to ski school... it would be a great idea for my youngest two cousins to teach me to ski. They were excellent skiers. The whole family was. It apparently never bothered any of the adults that my new cousin ski instructors were 9 and 11! I seem to remember them receiving about 3 sentences of instruction with the basic theme of “don’t loose her.” Both of my cousins happily took me off to ski with them. If they weren’t happy to have me in tow, they never let on. They made me feel like one of the pack. They also didn’t allow this tag along to alter their plans. I was going to ski, I was going to keep up with them. I was going to quickly learn to navigate all forms of lifts. And we were going to start our lessons at the TOP of the mountain. It’s actually a brilliant, although crazy idea. I was forced to learned quickly. There was only one way to get down to hot chocolate. To this day, I can keep up with anyone and I’m not afraid. My form is not so beautiful but I’m smiling with glee all the way down the mountain.

This theme of kids going off on adventures continued.

This is the dairy farm which was next to our house. We were all told never to go over there. We were also told we were not allowed near any of the cows. Although these two rules are actually the same message delivered twice, we didn’t listen. One day when the parents were otherwise occupied or most likely not home, we walked right over there and crawled into the closest pen with the cows. Somehow, real or imagined we decided one of the cows was “charging us” so we ran and dove under the rusty barbed wire fence. Being the slowest runner and fearing for my life, I didn’t notice that the barbed wire was cutting a line across my lower back. This created a new predicament, I was wounded, there was no possible explanation for the parents. Again the youngest cousins... who were about 10 and 13 at this point became my medics. There were secret rubbing alcohol cleanses and smearing whatever else we could find in the medicine cabinet on my wound, one that I could not reach nor see without a mirror. It’s amazing now that I think about it, that the 3 of us in the bathroom together did not alert one of the mothers to trouble! The horror of the issue at hand was on the light side of the scale of justice, when we considered the consequences of the parents finding out we had been in the cow pen. I remember leaving that Sunday eve promising my cousins I would hide my wound from my parents when I got home. I don’t think any of us told anyone until we were in our 30s! I will be forever grateful I never got lockjaw or anything else you can get from rusty wire in a dirty cow field!

These adventures continued. Suburban children in the mountains with their parents. Shooting cans, playing in the fields, riding tractors, hiding up in the trees from wildlife creatures. It was my own version of “Little House on the Prairie.” My wonderful new stepmother and her very fun sister made sure we did it all, some experiences were new and some were to keep the family rhythms flowing. My father and I were the only Protestant members of this large devoted Catholic family. Saturday mass happened on the way home from the mountain in ski boots and the ski sweaters. I often wondered what I was doing in this new church while my father and uncle were in the car reading the newspaper while the women and children were inside. I was told by my father I was welcome to join them in the car if I didn’t want to participate in mass. I tried this once or twice and decided an hour with old men reading the paper was 9 thousand times more boring than giggling with my cousins in the pews. As a result of years of family time in Vermont, I am as comfortable now in a Catholic Church as I am on a ski mountain.

I grew to love the seasons in Vermont. Winters were spent on the mountain, cozied up reading books at night, and family dinners around the table or at local Inns. I learned to quickly love pre dinner cocktail time around a fire at an old Vermont Inn. An Inn with a dog and board games in a real win! Summers were spent visiting the Jelly Mill, riding the Bromley slide, and swimming in Emerald Lake. All things my own children would grow up doing

We were weekenders... we left Bronxville on Friday nights after my father came home from work in New York City. We drove our family wagon to Vermont. No seatbelts. Sleeping bags in the way back of the wagon. We left after a full day of activities on Sunday. I remember feeling so tired when I crawled into my comfy Snoopy sleeping bag. Now I realize, my parents must have felt even more so!

I moved to Vermont 17 years ago. A soon to be divorced mother with five small children between the ages of 3 and 9. A girl from Bronxville came via New Canaan and Houston. My husband Donald came 30 years ago from Michigan via Palo Alto and Santa Fe. We both found Vermont through Aunts, Uncles, and cousins. We met here, married here. Our children are not weekenders. They are the real deal. They have Vermont in the hearts. And so do I.