Living the dream, but not in Greenwich

So, did you hear about the local family that up and moved with all five kids to Jackson Hole two weeks before school started? No one knew they were gone until we all got a text from them a week after they had left. They fooled us all!

Statements such as these are all over iPhones in Greenwich these days.

“Yeah, the family at the end of our road is currently sailing off the coast of South America — they’ve checked out until May!” my neighbor Melissa shouted angrily at me last week, from more than six feet away.

At the time, I was attempting to take my 12-yearold’s back-to-school photo on our driveway.

“How exactly do you expect me to smile through a face mask, Mom?” he shouted at me.

“Smile with your eyes, dammit!” I hollered back.

I bet no one was having THAT conversation on a sailboat off South America.

“What is it with all these families, moving away — and then telling everyone about it after they’ve moved,” my friend Sacha asked me earlier this week. “It’s like: ‘Surprise! We’re in Colorado!’ And some of these people are good friends.”

Two weeks ago, I got the following group email from friends we have known for over 20 years: “We have moved to Lake Tahoe! There’s a wine aisle in the local Target, and the nearest ski mountain is a four-minute drive from our house ... What’s not to love?”

“I wonder if we can take their spot at the yacht club now?” my husband asked, without skipping a beat.

When I emailed her back, she told me they had sold their house in Greenwich for a profit, enrolled the kids in private schools for a fraction of the cost and were living the dream. She signed off with “come visit!”

So why is all of this making me feel so … not happy?

“I’ll tell you why,” my friend Charlotte informed me. “It’s because they’re all leaving us behind.”

And there’s something especially excruciating about getting the news only after they’re gone, like they snuck away in the dark of the night, or something.

“Because they have snuck away,” Charlotte continued. “It’s like they didn’t let us in on the secret, the key ... the amulet!”

“That’s absurd,” another friend told me. “You have to remember people haven’t seen each other for months. We’ve all been in isolation, so of course everyone’s news is a surprise.”

“I think it’s more: We live in an Alpha community — all of us are constantly trying to figure out how to ‘live our best lives,’ ” a Greenwich mom offered. “And COVID has taught us that we can live differently, that we don’t all have to live by ice hockey or lacrosse schedules, and so we’re sort of redefining what happiness looks like right now.

“As a result, people have had these epiphanies and acted on them, without the usual debate they’d normally have with all their friends,” she said. “And then, all of the sudden, you get this email from Colorado, where they’re meditating with their kids on a mountain top with eagles — and it kind of leaves you here, feeling … less evolved.”

Totally. No eagles here — at least not on my road.

“It looks like this,” another Greenwich mom told me. “Everybody in our family has been struggling through this pandemic. Can’t see friends, no camp — or if you can, it’s muffled — and let’s face it: It’s highly likely school will shut down this winter. So moving everyone to a ski mountain is like giving ourselves a treat for enduring all of this … and why not do it now, when we can?”

There was a parent on a Board of Education meeting on Zoom this summer, who asked how GPS could “accommodate” their family with their remote-learning platform, given that they were moving to Hawaii for the winter, and were facing a significant time difference.

Suddenly Tod’s Point doesn’t look so special anymore. The irony is, of course, that Greenwich already feels like Hawaii for many of us who relocated here from New York City.

“Forget eagles,” my transplanted neighbor from Brooklyn told me. “We’re just happy to go for a jog outside with no face mask.”

They, too, had surprised friends, and moved on sudden epiphanies.

“We fled,” Rebecca Stevens-Walker told CNN in a report on relocations. “Our apartment looked like the rapture had come . ... And we definitely had the conversation, ‘What if we don’t go back?’ ”

In July, Pew Research Center found that one-fifth of all U.S. adults had either moved or knew someone who did.

And then there’s the money.

“Typical Greenwich,” a friend from the city snarked. “How about, ‘We’re running out of money, my job’s on the line, things are going to get worse so we need to relocate to a place where life is cheaper and sell this house while we can?’ Does that even happen out by you?”

Truth be told, I know a lot of Greenwich families who relocated to less expensive areas. (They just don’t like to tell anyone.)

Typical Greenwich, right?

“Private schools are literally half the price, the kids ski for gym class, and pan for gold while learning about the Gold Rush,” my Tahoe friend went on.

She had me at “half the price.”

But then there are the many people who simply can’t move. Remember them?

We have Molly Jong-Fast writing in Vogue in May about how “Why I Am Not Leaving New York,” — and how she is like “a violinist on the Titanic, playing away to keep myself from being afraid.”

And Amy Klein wrote in The Insider in April: “The rich have fled New York City. I’m sick of being told that I need to stay, because I want to escape, too.”

As she put it, “I don’t want to be the canary in the coal mine. I don’t want to sacrifice myself and my family for the good of everyone else. I don’t want to raise my New York City flag high in the germy air just so everyone else can breathe easier. Call me selfish, but I’m no worse than the people who already left, albeit not as privileged.”

My friend works at the homeless shelter network in NYC, and she tells me that each morning it feels like she is sending troops into battle.

“I don’t know,” she told me. “Maybe if we learn one thing through this whole ordeal, it will be to join hands and realize that we are all ultimately brothers and sisters.”

Even in Greenwich. Maybe even in “typical Greenwich,” too.