3391 Thomas Drive
The sale won’t close until March 30th, but I signed all the paperwork on March 9th to sell the house that Joe and I bought some 29 years ago. When we went house hunting the only guidance we gave our Realtor other than price was that Joe didn’t want an Eichler. She dutifully showed us some half dozen houses before Joe stumbled on the Eichler on Thomas Drive and decided it was worth a look. It was a later, better built, sturdier Eichler than the one Joe and his first wife had lived in early in their marriage, so he was willing to let go of his prejudice and consider it. We fell in love with it right away.
Eichler was an interesting California builder with a great design sense. He built low cost houses, aimed primarily at returning WWll vets at first. His designs were simple – single story, usually built around an atrium, mostly flat roofed. The earliest versions, like Joe’s first Eichler, were thrown together quickly using rather shoddy material. But as the post war building boom subsided, construction improved and more was spent on better material. Eichler (who was Jewish) stipulated that all his developments were open to buyers of all races and religions – an unusual posture in the days when restricted covenants were still commonplace. His company actively sought out Black buyers which was virtually unheard of. Some of the original Black families still lived in our neighborhood when we moved in. The neighborhoods were designed intentionally for young families. Most had short streets where through traffic would be limited, as it was on the loop that Thomas Drive makes off of Greer Road.
I believe we were the third owners of that house. The Shadlers, from whom we bought it, had built an A-frame roof over the atrium with three large skylights on the south facing slope. It increased the floor space to about 2100 square feet, and it filled the house with light. Although Eichlers typically had loads of windows and sliding doors, they were often rather dark because they were designed with wide roof overhangs. Even though most of the rooms in our house were dark, that central room in the space of the former atrium gave an immediate experience of light when you walked in.
Joe and I moved in with my teenage daughter, Liz, and our Sheltie, Penny. Liz moved out, but our nest never felt empty. In 2000 we had the dreary, unimaginative landscaping completely redone by a wonderful landscape architect, creating our own little Garden of Eden. Penny developed terrible arthritis, and we had her put down. In 2004 we had a local muralist, Greg Brown, paint three skylights on the north slope of the atrium ceiling, just as Joe had imagined it the very first time we saw the house. And then in 2005 Joe was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. We lived together in that lovely home for the next 18 months and he died there, as he had wished. Even with Joe’s illness and his much too early death, before he turned 69, when I think of our time together on Thomas Drive what I remember is how happy we were, how lucky we felt every day to be together in a home we loved, a home that suited us perfectly.
When Joe was ill we continued our pattern of talking openly about everything. He was remarkably open about facing death, and he helped me be open about my own fears and sadness. But the one thing I didn’t share with him was the idea I started developing about remodeling the house. Perhaps that bit of secrecy was my way of starting to build a future without him, a future I mostly dreaded thinking about. The idea of the remodel was a positive anchor for me in a future that otherwise seemed so bleak.
After Joe died we sat shiva for a full week, so the house was full of family and friends. But then the first week of mourning ended and I was alone in the house.
I don’t remember who suggested that I might use Alex Bergtraum as my architect for the remodel. We knew Alex’s parents from Congregation Beth Am and the first time I met Alex he told me that Joe, Beth Am’s unofficial photographer, had taken pictures of both his bris and his bar mitzvah. Alex was delighted with my basic idea for the remodel which involved opening the living room / dining room / kitchen space, creating a new master bedroom and bath, and separating off a bedroom/bathroom/sitting room wing that I thought my parents might spend winters in. Alex turned my rough idea into a beautiful plan, solving problems I hadn’t even considered. We started the planning in the spring of 2008 and I moved out when the work began that summer, just a year after Joe’s death. The demolition took most of the house down to the studs. It was a good analogy for the way I stripped my life down and started rebuilding it, letting go of my life with Joe and starting life without him.
Initially, I moved in with Jill, Joe’s older daughter. I had planned to room with her through the remodel. But life is full of surprises. Jill was on the board of a theater company run by a work colleague, Sean Murphy and his then wife, Blythe. Blythe was the daughter and step-daughter of Nancy and Jay Bosley. After Nancy was murdered that summer Sean and Jill thought I might be able to help Jay through the early stages of grief, and they introduced us in September, just a month after Nancy’s death. Jay and I began meeting for coffee and conversation, sharing the experience of loss and of rebuilding lives that had changed so dramatically. To our surprise, and despite efforts to deny it, we found ourselves deeply attracted to each other, and before the year was out, I moved in with Jay. I was clear about my plans – that the remodel was in progress and that as soon as it was done I would move back to Thomas Drive. When the time came, Jay was willing to move in with me.
Everything about the remodel went well – it all turned out better than I had imagined. Jay and I moved into this beautiful new house – new, but still the same. There was the garden, there was Thomas Drive, there was the same footprint, there were the memories for me. And along with suitcases and boxes, Jay moved in with memories of Nancy. It often felt like we were a foursome, with Joe and Nancy still very much present in our lives and in our conversations.
We set about joining our blended family, forging new bonds. The blending happened in many ways, but right at the heart of it was the tradition of burger night on Thomas Drive. It started as a one off dinner where our extended families could meet – my daughter and Jays’ and their families. And from the first it included my daughter’s mother-in-law, Holly, and her daughter Bethany. Everyone could help in the big open kitchen, and we had room for 22 at the long table. We had such a good time that we agreed to do it again. It became a monthly tradition and it built a new family.
My parents did come out from Connecticut a couple of times and stayed in the section of the house I had designed for them, but it never really suited them. I was too busy and they were homesick and missed my sister Tamar who spent a lot of time with them. In December of 2010 Jay’s granddaughter, 10 year old Cristalena, came to live with us and moved into that section of the house. Cris lived there through the rest of her fourth grade year. She and I walked to Palo Verde School together at first, and then she began walking with our neighbor, her schoolmate Melanie, or the two of them would scooter off down Thomas Drive together. It was a joy to have Cris there and we were sad when she decided to go back to her family in Hawaii.
The next evolution of 3391 Thomas Drive was the conversion of that guest section of the house into a separate apartment. It was pretty simple to seal it off from the rest of the house, since there was already a separate door to the outside. We put in a small, efficient kitchen, and with the sitting room, bedroom and bathroom it made a lovely, private, one-bedroom apartment. Our first tenant was a young psychologist, Michelle, who specialized in sleep disorders. Before long she asked if her boyfriend could move in. By 2016 they were pregnant and bought their own townhouse. It occurs to me that the child conceived in that sweet little apartment is in elementary school by now.
Jay and I had such a happy life on Thomas Drive. The house and garden were often filled with family and friends. The big table accommodated burger nights, Thanksgivings, Passover seders, break-the-fast dinners, birthday parties, and many smaller gatherings. In 2011, the year my first grandson, Asher, was born, my daughter Liz, too busy with a newborn to do holiday shopping, came up with the idea of picture day. We had shifted our Thanksgiving celebration to the weekend before Thanksgiving so that our kids, who all had multiple family obligations, wouldn’t have to stress about spending Thanksgiving with us. Liz brought in a photographer who spent an hour or so before dinner taking a mix of candid shots and posed groups. Then for holiday gifts Liz gave everyone one framed photo and a thumb drive of all the pictures. It was a wonderful event – something we all looked forward to every year. The house and garden offered great backgrounds and wonderful light. I have seven years of beautiful family photos from those picture days.
I had imagined we would live out our lives on Thomas Drive. We loved our life there. But as I said, life is full of surprises. Every time we visited Peter and Aviva in Cooperstown we found ourselves drawn more and more towards the quiet and simplicity of small town life, far from eight lane freeways. In 2016 we found a beautiful property in Hartwick just a few miles from Cooperstown, and in January of 2018 we rented out the main portion of the Thomas Drive house and moved to Hartwick, to the home Jay named Sunnyhill.
I had been fortunate to find a terrific property manager for Thomas Drive, Cynthia, and she found a series of great tenants who took excellent care of the house. In 2022 another baby was conceived there, this time in the main section of the house where we had lived. After that baby was born we knew that those tenants would be moving out to a two bedroom place. At the same time, our tenant in the front apartment gave notice. It seemed like a good time to think about selling the house. I had imagined I would own it until I died and Joe’s daughters and Liz inherited it. But with our move to New York and with the prospect of climate change making it troublesome to be in a flood zone, selling seemed more appealing than holding it.
The tenants moved out February 19th. By the 24th Cynthia had it on the Realtors’ Friday tour. She held open houses that weekend, and by Tuesday we had a full price offer with no contingencies. My head was spinning.
I don’t quite know what it means to me to sell the house. I have known for several years that I wouldn’t live there again, and because we are so happy in New York it was easy to come to terms with that. But selling it is a different kind of ending. Selling our old family property in Amenia was far more wrenching, but this sale feels important too. When we sold Amenia I had a chance to think through how memory is connected to place. When the rickety old house in Amenia was inevitably (and justly) leveled by the new owners I wrote about the strange experience of thinking about all the joy that old house had held that could only live in our memories now. I have a similar experience now thinking about 3391 Thomas Drive with new owners who will build their own new story there.
I have been blessed to have owned that lovely home and to have lived there with two wonderful partners. I’m blessed to have so many sweet memories – of weaving while Joe worked at his desk, of planning the new garden with Connie, of grandkids crawling on the floor and climbing the Japanese Maple that had been little more than a stick when Joe and I planted it, of Jay cooking burgers for 20, of a house full of laughter and love – years of joys and sorrows held in that space. I became so much of the person I am now on Thomas Drive. I know that nothing is lost in selling it, that I carry everything important in my memory. And yet – something is lost.