Welcome to the Tree House

When we last spoke, I was in the beginning of a long apartment search. Summer began, and we spent the hot, sunny weekends racing from neighborhood to neighborhood, apartment to apartment, lining up on the sidewalks with other couples. We saw beautiful places in Bed Stuy and applied to many of them. Once we even had a Zoom "interview" with a landlady, nervously greeting a stranger and trying to make ourselves seem fun but not loud, tidy but still spontaneous, and responsible, too.

"Everyone I've met has been so wonderful," she said, "if I don't pick you, don't take it personally.”

A day passed and we were rejected. Of course, we took it personally, running through a list of possibilities: did we kiss too much butt? Did we seem too young? Too old? Was mentioning our love of karaoke a bad idea?

We were rejected three more times. It was demoralizing, but it was common. Everyone was returning back to the city as the number of people vaccinated increased. The competition was higher than normal, we weren't prepared. But, near the middle of May we applied to rent a duplex in Stuyvesant Heights.

"Its a long shot," I kept telling Alistair. I imagined hundreds of couples had applied for it, as the broker said, it was "extraordinary" and he was right. We waited.

Five days before the projected move-in date we got the good news: the apartment was ours. However, this meant coordinating a move in less than a week. We spent Memorial Day weekend packing and had a disastrous move, our haste made a lot of waste in dollars and sanity. The couch and headboard wouldn't fit up the stairs at the new place, and hoisting up the furniture through the windows was suggested, but we declined.

"Call the Couch Doctor," said the mover, which was likely the most New York thing I'd ever heard of. I Googled the doctor, who hacks up oversized sofas on the sidewalk and sews them back together in your apartment. I dialed a number and an Old School New York accent picked up on the other end.

"Yeah, I could do ya for $400," he says the number so quickly it sounds like it's pulled out of his head. I didn't even send photos! But instead the movers took the couch with them for storage, another headache for another day.

Then we settled in, one box at a time. There were a few days where the books piled up so high that we'd hear crashes upstairs or downstairs and just assume that one of the stacks was on the floor. The feeling you get waking up in hotel rooms, when you have to realize where you are. There weren't curtains on the bedroom windows and the door to the terrace, so we woke up with the sun. You'd think that would be annoying, but I always felt more rested and woke up earlier this way. I began to notice, like as everyone on my Zoom calls, the tall trees dominating the view from both floors.

"Its like living in a tree house," I said to Alistair one day while sitting on the terrace.  The nickname stuck. Then the post-move chaos subsided, the boxes disappeared.  Our first break from packing was a late night out having cocktails and dinner at the famous pizza joint a few blocks away. The disruption of moving felt like it was behind us and only the summer ahead.