Home Is Where The Heart Is

I woke up in Riverdale this morning humming an old Sally Fingerett song, “Home is Where the Heart Is.” Although the song is not at all about our present situation, that refrain is really resonating for me right now.

For some years we have been leading two lives: our life in New York and our life in Sharon. We are usually in New York during the work week and in Sharon over the weekend, although we do occasionally stay in New York on weekends. But for the past two and a half weeks we have been in Sharon.

I love our house in Riverdale. Before this house, we were living in a house about two miles north of here in Yonkers. Although it suited our needs, the house was never our style, and as we became more involved in a synagogue in Riverdale we finally decided to move south. I can no longer remember why we even looked at this house. From the outside it appeared lovely, but it was, to be honest, priced more than a bit above our range. I knew we were in trouble the minute we walked inside. We ended up taking a leap, and we have been fortunate that despite the dip over the past few years, the house is still worth quite a bit more than we paid in 1999. We have lived here now more than twice as long as we had lived in any of the places before this.

I moved to New York kicking and screaming back in 1991. But much to my surprise, I have grown to love The City. In defense of my earlier attitude, New York has become a much safer and cleaner (or should I say kinder and gentler?) place to live than it used to be. There is never a lack of things to do. Riverdale is amazingly close to Manhattan, so we have the pleasure of living in a house with a yard, albeit a small one, while being just minutes away from all the wonders of Manhattan.

Now that the rest of our family is in Sharon, we toy with the idea of buying a house up there, but we just cannot bring ourselves to do it. Since we are seldom there during the week it would be difficult to keep up with the inevitable headaches that a house entails. The conversion of the old Wilber School into apartments right in the center of Sharon came at precisely the right time, and we have rented an apartment there since shortly after it opened.

So why is it that every time we come back to New York I start to miss Sharon, but while we are in Sharon I miss New York? It brings to mind an old Joni Mitchell lyric:

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?

Still, home is where the heart is. Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco. Who says we cannot have our hearts in two places?

We had a wonderful remainder of Sukkot, and I am certain we set a personal record for meals eaten in the Sukkah without rain, snow, heat, cold, or insects to force our evacuation (as happens pretty much every year). Our son-in-law’s parents were also in Sharon and we were pleased to have two meals with them, lunch on Thursday in Simmie and Ronen’s Sukkah and lunch on Sabbath, after the holiday ended, in our apartment. On Friday we joined a group of similar-aged friends, most of whom we have known for the 25+ years since we first moved to Sharon, for an enjoyable and tasty pot-luck lunch.

We returned to an amazing pile of mail! How do I make all those catalogues stop? Hopefully I did not lose any important mail weeding through them! The good weather is predicted to continue, and I am hoping to spend some time outdoors while we can.

Meanwhile, have a good week all.

Love,

Rebecca