In July 2020, we bought a house over FaceTime.

We did not, as the Phrase of the Year goes, have that on our 2020 bingo card. The house was 2,000 miles away in a town we had rarely visited, on a road we weren’t sure how to pronounce, in a neighborhood we didn’t know. But by July of 2020, when the world’s idea of “normal” had already been redefined, making the biggest investment of our lives through a small, handheld video screen seemed like perfectly rational and sensible behavior.