How did a nice Ozzie girl end up living in small-town New Jersey?

Well, I was in Japan at a film festival, and I fell in LOVE (yes, all caps love) with this guy.

We got married (eventually but that’s a different story) had kids and lived in the West Village for ten years.

Then we sold everything and went sailing for a year. You can read about that grand adventure here.

We ran out of money and time in Didim, Turkey. We came back to New York, got a dog, and moved to Brooklyn.

We liked Brooklyn a lot, we loved the Park and the Food Co-Op, but we were restless.

A friend of mine had posted a link to a website that Elizabeth Gilbert had created to sell her house. I watched the house tour, enjoyed the real-estate porn and fantasized about having space and a garden of my own one-day. Then forgot about it.

One Friday James announced at dinner that his accountant had told him he should consider moving out of New York. I said I would never ever consider moving anywhere for tax reasons. However, if he was interested in change, I knew about a pretty amazing house for sale outside New York. Wine had been consumed, spirits were high. Everyone wanted to see the video. The kids were really into it, and they hadn’t even been drinking. Then again what young person can resist a Skybrary

James said, "Let's email the broker,” I said, "You're crazy and it's probably sold anyway” James emailed the broker. She emailed back and said there was an open house on Sunday. We drove out to Frenchtown and looked at the house. We had lunch in town and looked at the schools. We made an offer on the house on Monday. It was accepted on Tuesday. We moved in a month later on August 1, 2014.

It wasn’t until the opportunity arose that we realize how much we had wanted change.

After living on board a boat for a year, we missed being so close and in sync with nature. I missed the freedom that comes with being totally responsible for your environment and time, as opposed to having to constantly navigate large shared time and space. And the systems that have to be in place for a large city to work.

We had just gone through the grueling process of trying to get Paloma into high school and Ronan into middle school in New York City. They had both gotten into good schools, but it had been pretty brutal. It made me worry about the kids having to grow up in such a competitive environment, where they felt there was no room for them to experiment and fail. A system where they felt the pressure to be constantly seen as perfect and special, or they would get lost in the shuffle. Then be shut out of the schools they wanted to attend and consequently the lives they wanted.

I was also over the day-to-day business of life being such a hassle and a hustle. Although on that Friday night I’m not sure, I could have articulated all that.

I love New York. I will always love New York, and I'm very happy that it's only an hour and a half away. But at this time in my families’ lives it feels amazing to be more the masters of our space and time, to have the freedom and flexibility to sit on the front porch and watch the sun go down. I am falling in love with being a country girl again.