June 22, 2005
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The couple at home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., with their sons, Cecil, left, and Milo
June 19, 2005
Lindsay Morris and Stephen Munshin
By LOIS SMITH BRADY
AFTER Lindsay Morris and Stephen Munshin married nine years ago they were as rootless as orchids. They disliked anything even suggesting home, like monogrammed towels or overstuffed couches you sink into like quicksand. They found bed-and-breakfast inns about as appealing as spider webs. Even their work – they were partners in River Road, a clothing company specializing in Himalayan yak-wool coats – required them to travel constantly. Their home, a one-bedroom cottage in Sag Harbor, N.Y., on the East End of Long Island, was spare to the point of uninhabited. “We didn’t really decorate,” Ms. Morris said. “It made it easier to leave.”
And leave they did, spending the first years of their marriage on the road – rough, rough roads – building their business. For months at a time they traveled, usually by motorcycle, through Nepal, sleeping in tents, shopping for wool, getting to know about each other’s intestinal fortitude and comfort levels with darkness, strangers, insects and overheated engines.
If they sank roots anywhere, it was into each other. “There were times when we’d pull into some small town on a motorcycle, and there’s just a little tea shop on the side of the road and people leering out at you in the darkness,” Mr. Munshin, 40, said. “You really become a team.” On the road they also honed a marital skill, he said: “to laugh at things that might normally end a relationship.”
On the motorcycle they always took the long way because they loved talking. “We communicate better when we have wheels under us and we’re moving,” Ms. Morris, 39, said. “I’m not a real face-to-face person. I’m more comfortable side by side.”
Even when they returned to Sag Harbor, they continued traveling, driving up and down the East Coast, selling their coats. “The coats were very cozy,” Ms. Morris said. “When we would travel around to do street fairs, we’d sleep in the back of our Trooper, on top of and under the coats. We’d have wool up our noses.”
Mr. Munshin said: “It became a familiar sensation, not being at home, being in transition. In India you spend two or three hours driving from one place to the next. Travel is so slow. It’s an acceptable way to spend time as opposed to, ‘I’ve got to be there now.’ “
Today they have slowed to a halt. Last year they quit designing clothes after re-examining their footloose life and business and asking, “Why are we burning all this fuel?”
Their lives are now local rather than global, communal rather than just two on a motorcycle, and full of a different, domestic motion. They have two sons, Cecil, 10 months; and Milo, 4, who was born a fashion-conscious nomad. Ms. Morris describes them as “delicious little wise men living in our house who spread laughter and chaos wherever they go.”
She helps create bee products for a local apiary, the Hamptons Honey Company, while Mr. Munshin delivers the honey to farm stands in what looks like an ice cream truck.
“Stephen comes home with eggs and beautiful fresh greens and wines,” she said. “People shower him with gifts. He’s the honey man.”
Mr. Munshin is also the publisher of a new magazine, Edible East End, which covers Long Island’s vineyards, farm stands, fishermen, potato farmers and potato chip makers.
They now own a different house in Sag Harbor, filled with heavy hand-carved Indian furniture and other reminders of their travels. One of their favorites is a patchwork quilt made from dozens of pieces of Indian wedding saris. “It’s symbolic of our marriage,” Ms. Morris said. “You have glistening shiny bits, and you also have untextured pieces, very flat and cottony and just very everyday.”
They also love everything that “home” suggests: knowing the neighbors, knowing when asparagus season begins. They are now the kind of people who sit on the front porch and invite friends in for lemonade (sweetened with honey).
“I love my porch,” Ms. Morris said. “We’re getting to know a lot of people, which makes you feel grounded. We finally have roots here. We’re digging in.”
Almost every summer evening they literally dig for food. “We get friends and friends’ children together, and we go out raking for clams on the beach,” she said. “We tend to hover close and converse and rake and split the occasional one open. You’re standing there in the sun on the water, eating a clam, and you can hear the kids laughing on the beach. It confirms the reasons we live here. It’s all said in a clam.”
After clamming, they drive to Quail Hill, a communal vegetable farm in Amagansett, where they are members. The leeks, bok choy and tomatoes are still warm from the sun when they return home. Mr. Munshin cooks. “Lindsay likes to set the table and set the tone and light the candles,” he said, adding, “The domestic lines are blurred in this house.”
They have few regrets about settling down, except that they don’t talk as much as they did in their motorcycle-riding years. “At the end of the day I feel like, ‘Oh, my God, I have five more things to say to Stephen,’ ” she said. “But, it doesn’t matter. We have all the time in the world.”
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