New Living Arrangements

Willy and Bonks in the sunlight in our Brooklyn apartment about 4 years ago.


On Sunday, they will be leaving with Michael as he starts a new job in Bluffton, South Carolina just across the channel from Hilton Head.  I will be joining them in the first week of June, and then returning to New York in the middle of August to teach the Fall Semester back at Bronx Community College.

I am not looking forward to this temporary separation.  I haven't lived alone in many years.

If Michael's new job in Bluffton turns out to be a big success (which it probably will be), then I will be spending part of my time there and part of the time back in New York teaching until I retire.

Last summer, we joined the ranks of property owners when we bought a nice condo in Bluffton that's about 10 minutes from the beach at Hilton Head, and about a half hour away from Savannah.  The new condo is over twice as large as our Brooklyn apartment and with all new appliances.

Here are a few pictures of it that I took last Thanksgiving.  Since then, the carpet was replaced with a new hardwood floor, and there's a little more furniture.  But, it still looks a little bare.  It's a second floor condo with its own staircase to the ground floor, and a small balcony from the living room.  There are two bedrooms with walk-in closets, and two baths.  After more than 2 decades of depending on laundries in New York, we finally have our own washer/dryer.  I will be using my bedroom as a studio.  It's actually a little bigger than the studio space I occupy now.

We are very lucky to have this condo.  If we had waited even another week, we would have been priced out of the market.  It looks like this is where I will be spending my summers (thank God for central AC!).

Our dreams of owning property either in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area ran into the hard wall of the high cost/ low wage economy.  And even then, we are lucky to get this.  Michael has an old friend who lives in Bluffton who persuaded him to buy property there.  It turns out that the area is full of transplants from New York with the same idea we had.  There's no way we could afford to buy anything within a 300 mile radius of the city these days. 

I think this will be the nicest place that I've lived in since I left home in 1977.  I look forward to spending my summer there and working on my art in a studio I don't have to walk 3 miles to get to.

I will be traveling back and forth between Bluffton and New York until I retire.
It's going to be hard.

A picture I took in Savannah last Thanksgiving.  Spanish moss everywhere.

Michael with Yours Truly on the beach at Hilton Head.