Thoughts on moving houses

“A house for sale is not a home,” says Wendell Berry, which is perhaps why we have delayed putting our home up for sale as we slowly move, box by box, the five short – long? – miles down the road to the house my grandfather built in 1938.

We are moving from Chapel Street to Bank Street, which I trust does not indicate a moral demotion from my lofty spiritual perch to the world of grubby materialism. I know for certain it does not augur riches.

We are holding off on selling our Chapel Street home till we’ve cleared it out and are fully moved into Bank, though I nurture a ridiculous hope that before then I might unearth a rusted coffee can filled with 19th-century gold pieces that will enable us to keep both.

Our Chapel Street abode is a Greek revival farmhouse dating from the early 1830s. For most of a century it was inhabited by our county’s leading family of spiritualists. I’ve never seen a ghost herein, though the squirrels in the attic do a pretty good impression of skittering haints. I would welcome ghosts in the new house, since there never was a kinder man than my grandfather.

Lucine and I purchased our soon-to-be-former home in 1992 from a charming eccentric who had named it “La Maison des Fleurs Printemps,” and the first thing I did upon moving in was to rip out that sign—though of course the flowers still bloom every May.

I had a wonderful second-floor office crammed with books and files, its walls papered with posters and our daughter’s artwork. The Kauffman homestead, which is at most two-thirds the size of our current home, offers no such aerie, so I am consigned to the basement, which provides ample room for my avalanche of books and LPs and autographed baseballs and posters bearing images and signatures of persons and things from George McGovern to Barber Conable, Gore Vidal to William Cullen Bryant, Ray Nitschke of the Green Bay Packers to Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto, and The Hired Hand to Zabriskie Point. (I’m a sucker for early 1970s cinema.)

If I must settle in this netherworld, I told Lucine, the dingy-gray basement had to be chromatically transformed into something out of The Brady Bunch. So we’re painting it a color dubbed “sunshine yellow.” Bring sunglasses if you visit.

We are leaving the home in which we raised our daughter, drank thousands of cups of coffee, laughed or rolled eyes at countless in-jokes and lived with humor and love and exasperation for the majority of our lives. We also threw the occasional idiotically themed party. The most preposterous was triggered by our buying a bottle of absinthe, out of which grew what we called the French Literary Party. Two dozen partiers endured readings from Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire before we all got back to drinking and talking about the Buffalo Bills. ‘Twas très magnifique!

Technically we’re moving south, but I doubt we quite qualify as snowbirds

Our pets are buried out back. The Chapel Street house has an unobstructed southern horizon that reveals the Greatest Show in the Universe every clear night. Now and then I’d drag out the eight-inch reflector telescope I bought decades ago with found money when an English publication (not The Spectator, I assure you!) paid me a debt I’d been owed for more than a year. I have relished walking to the post office every morning, dropping by the service station for coffee with Sam and Bob and Whitey and Bear. I don’t believe I will ever be able to think of that house without a tear coming to my eye.

All my memories are there. But they’re also in the Kauffman homestead and, since none of the younger members of the clan wanted it, Lucine and I figured it fell to us to keep it in the family.

The Bank Street house is just two lots from the home in which I grew up and in which my octogenarian parents still live. Technically we’re moving south, but I don’t think we quite qualify as snowbirds.

We’ll be just one block from Dwyer Stadium, home of Batavia’s Muckdogs, where I have spent well over a thousand nights watching baseball in a cocoon of community from which I hope never to emerge. (Sixty-five years? How the hell did I get so old? I am like my late friend Henry W. Clune, the Rochester novelist, who lived to a Methuselan age of 105 but said that he always felt 18 inside. But then, he said, you look in the mirror…) “Sometimes I feel so happy/ Sometimes I feel so sad,” Lou Reed once sang. That about sums up my mood these days.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.