Note: Jocelyn Jane Cox is a local author and writing coach who has lived in Valley Cottage since 2010. She wrote the Chronicles of Parenting humor column for Nyack News & Views from 2015-2022. Her book, Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice came out from Vine Leaves Press in September. Her story is about becoming a new mother while losing her own mother to dementia. During that difficult time, she drew on the strengths she learned on the ice as a competitive figure skater. She also writes about meeting her husband, Rob Strati. In the following excerpt, she shares how they moved from the South Bronx to Rockland County.
Jocelyn will be appearing at Big Red Books on Thursday, November 6 at 6:30 pm to read from her book alongside eight of her students from her Big Red Nonfiction Workshop, who will also be reading their work.
***
After Rob and I got married, we started looking for houses casually. I’d moved into his apartment, in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx, three months after we got engaged.
“SoBro,” right by the Willis Avenue Bridge, was perfectly situated right in between everything we loved in NYC, and where we both worked, north of the city. But I was getting tired of city life. Over the years, I’d had neck, shoulder, and back problems (residual injuries from my years as a figure skater) and lugging all my groceries and skating gear up all those flights of stairs wasn’t helping. I was dreaming of a driveway. I’d lived all over the country at this point, in big cities and in small towns. The suburbs were calling my name, and I wanted to answer.
We looked at places in the towns of Peekskill, Croton, New Rochelle, and eventually focused our search on Nyack, where our friends Michael and Sylvie lived. But most of the houses we toured in Nyack were old Victorians with severe dormers in the upstairs bedrooms. In order to not hit his head, Rob, at 6’4”, had to bend his neck 45 degrees to the side. I imagined him knocking himself unconscious every time he got up at night.
“It’s nice,” he said, in one of these bedrooms, being his open-minded and enthusiastic self. But I could not imagine him in that space.
The properties we were seeing were quite different from new builds my mother helped to sell in Delaware. I told her about the 1970’s A-frame shaped like a chalet, a Colonial right by the highway, and a property with several buildings, each of them more dilapidated than the other. Everything was a little off. While I had my driveway fantasy, Rob was hoping for a park or trails where he could run. His other X factor was: a space he could use as an art studio.
Finally, an interesting listing popped up online, a ranch house built in 1965. The interior photos included white furniture, white walls punctuated with colorful art, and high ceilings. It looked similar to our apartment. The owners even had the same round vintage coffee table as us, with a tulip base.
It was located one town over from Nyack with the quaint name of Valley Cottage.The garage had already been converted to an art studio. And it was one mile from Rockland Lake, with a three-mile path around it. We made an appointment.
The house was very similar to the one I’d grown up in in Wisconsin. It even had the same slate tiles in the entryway. I fell in love with it instantly. It was bright, open, and Rob could even stand up straight in it. By the time we walked into the studio, which actually looked more like a gallery, I was shaking.
There was even an attached Mother-in-Law suite with a separate door on the far end of the house. The original owner had been a dentist, and this had been his office. We’d later find out that the neighbor across the street had gotten teeth pulled there back in the 1960s.
After we pulled out of the driveway (the driveway!), we drove over to Rockland Lake. It was grey and dismal out and the lake was iced over at the edges, but the path was clear and people were running and walking along it despite the cold.
“This would be a good place to run,” Rob said.
“Yes,” I agreed, trying to not get too excited.
We made an offer that day.
The sellers couldn’t move out for six months, so we drove up to the area from the Bronx every few weeks to explore and figure out if we were making the right decision. With Sylvie and Michael, we tried the decadent almond croissants from the French bakery, Patisserie Didier Dumas. We ate at the local hotspot, Art Café, an Israeli restaurant that served enormous salads sprinkled with za’atar.
One day in the spring, we walked the whole loop of Rockland Lake. Birds were chirping and tree buds were opening. We spotted a woodpecker, a turtle, a caterpillar, some swans, a whole bunch of ducks, and gaggles of geese including lots of fuzzy goslings. It was like a Bambi remake and they were all coming out to welcome us to the woodland. For months, we’d been moving forward with the process, hesitantly. More than once, we told ourselves we could walk away, and losing the deposit we’d put down would be better than doing something we couldn’t handle. I was worried about the financial outlay, and the monthly payment. I noted that the “mort” part of the word mortgage meant death.
“Lot of nature out here,” I said to Rob. And he agreed. During our walk, many of our concerns and doubts drifted away. This was not just the house for us, but where we wanted to live our lives together.
***
We moved in on July 3rd. Exhausted, we sat that night on the front porch. When we first toured the house in January, we didn’t realize that, in the warmer months, the pergola over the front porch would fill in with wisteria, a canopy of leaves and lavender flowers. I drank a celebratory glass of red wine on the built-in bench, and Rob smoked a cigar – something I’d never seen him do before and haven’t seen since.
We spent the next day putting together furniture and unpacking boxes, arranging and rearranging the space, as if we were on one of the “housey” shows on HGTV that she and I liked to watch. That night, we again sat under the pergola, and noticed the twinkle of fireworks in the distance, from a few different towns. We walked out onto the lawn to get a better look. We could only see the tops of those glittering orbs beyond the trees and could only vaguely hear them, but it was beautiful. Fireflies blinked all around us. Where my feet were planted on the grass, I was almost exactly 33 miles away from my cramped apartment on 75th and York Avenue where I’d lived for several years before meeting Rob, but I felt a thousand miles away from all that anxious dating and worrying about the future. I was exactly where I wanted to be.
I looped my arm around my guy’s waist. And he looped back.
“Home,” I said.
