I don’t live here anymore.
It was an odd thought, experiencing the present in the past tense. While we still owned the house for another two weeks and the movers had not yet arrived, we had already taken the animals and our valuables to my mother-in-law’s place across the Bay, and our last night sleeping in the house was days earlier.
Walking through the quiet, dark rooms, memories flooded back, and I remembered how different things looked when we bought this house. Over the past 7 years it changed as much as we did. In that time, we replaced the roof, installed new floors, re-did all the plumbing and electrical. We had to rip out the palm trees in the front yard when they got sick. The old, rotting deck was torn out. My wife repainted the home office a deep navy blue as a surprise when I was out of town.
I felt a lump in my throat when I noticed scuff marks on the walls from our now deceased pets Phoenix and Jack. Nostalgia for such tiny, mundane details reminded me of The National song “Weird Goodbyes”:
Memorize the bathwater, memorize the air
There’ll come a time I’ll wanna know I was here
Names on the doorframes, inches and ages
Handprints in concrete, at the softest stages
Our time in Florida got off to an inauspicious start—we moved to Tampa in fall 2019, just months before a novel virus shut down the world. The COVID-19 pandemic trapped us in the house for 2020 and most of 2021, delaying meeting people and putting down roots. We lived through multiple hurricanes, including close calls with Helene and Milton in 2024. We grappled with surging prices and political unrest. I bounced jobs multiple times from a start-up to Big Corporate to independent freelancer.
But there were plenty of good times, too. As we came out of lockdown, we started making friends, like our trivia team of local vets called “Kitty Magic,” the trainers at the local gym, jamming with musicians in Lutz, and the local RedBar chapter of watch collectors. There were concerts and trips to Disney and staycations exploring every corner of Florida from Tallahassee to the Keys. We took advantage of the perpetual sunshine with beach time and learning to scuba dive.
So it was with very mixed feelings that we packed up our cars and hit the road on Friday. Over the next three days we wound our way up the I-75 to I-95, past the DC Beltway, up the New Jersey Turnpike, and finally climbing the Catskills on I-87. Driving for 8 hours a day with four animals and cars loaded to the brim with essentials and belongings we didn’t trust to movers was certainly an “adventure.” On the first day, the dogs and cats both vomited, and one of them blew up their crate with poop. All you can do is clean it up and make the best of it. I treated it like the least fun version of a summer road trip.
When we pulled up to our last AirBNB yesterday, it was truly a full circle moment: Exactly 18 years ago this month, I left upstate New York for vet school on the West Coast. While I was sad this Florida chapter of our story was coming to an end, I remembered life often has a funny way of bringing you back in some way or another. Pretty much every place I’ve been for school or work, I ended up returning to later. Like the time I went back to Pomona to deliver an alumni address to graduating DVM students at WesternU, or spending years as a locum at Auburn after I thought I’d left it behind for good. Odds are good I’ll be back in Florida someday!
The sign above stands outside our favorite part of the Gulf Coast in Indian Rocks Beach. It’s a reminder to be courteous and not leave any garbage in the sand or water. But the reality is we all leave things behind when we move on… Houses. Memories. Friendships. Careers. Loved ones who pass on. A million little pieces of our hearts radiate out across the places we’ve been and the people (and animals) we touch, connecting us forever.
As we start this next chapter of our lives in New York, we will make new friends and memories and continue to leave our mark. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
—Eric
