Wanderlust to Houselust

For much of my early life I was propelled by wanderlust, a restless curiosity that carried me through the Americas, Asia, and Western Europe with longer stays in the Adirondacks, New England, Washington, Santa Fe, Paris, and Rome. Movement was natural, even necessary, for me. New, unfamiliar landscapes and languages exhilarated me, sustaining my appetite for discovery. Belonging wasn’t tethered to a single person or place. It lived in the poetry of perception — wondering, wandering, immersing myself in the lived moment — each new horizon quietly beckoning the next.

But in the early 2000s the currents that had always pulled me outward began to slacken. Between 2001 and 2005, a series of catalysts reshaped my insatiable curiosity and my sense of yearning and belonging: my rapture of Susan, the rupture of 9/11, the illness and loss of a lifelong friend, and the sudden death of Susan’s father. Distance began to feel less like freedom and more like estrangement. I was beginning to consider the possibility that meaning might reside less in the next destination than in co-creating a life together with Susan.

That convergence of love, grief, and possibility eventually led us to Essex, New York, on the Adirondack Coast of Lake Champlain, where we discovered Rosslyn, a timeworn 19th-century home ready for reimagining and revitalization. And so began a new sort of adventure: rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of a neglected historic property, cultivating a poetics of place, and learning that rootedness can be as expansive and exotic as any journey abroad.