“It’s quite unusual to come back to a place 30 years removed and have it be very similar to what it was 30 years ago,” Dunne said. “And that was really appealing to me and my wife.”

You may see Dunne — a classical and jazz guitarist and composer — perform with The Accidental Trio on Saturday, Aug. 14 (8 p.m.) at the Keene Valley Congregational Church. Or perhaps playing guitar at the Ausable Club or other venues in the High Peaks region. And you may see Coccia working at The Birch Store or the Keene Valley Library.

“We just love the area, the nature. We both feel a really strong connection to the mountains,” Dunne said. “It’s a really wonderful community. We’ve made a lot of friends, and there’s a really good thriving arts community, which is especially important to me.”

While they had good lives in Texas, it never felt like home; both are orginally from upstate New York.

“This feels like home,” Dunne said of Keene.

Dunne, 62, grew up in Albany and graduated from SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music with a bachelor’s degree in 1981.

“During that time, I started coming out here to hike a lot,” Dunne said, adding that he lived in Lake Placid for a couple of summers, working as a waiter at the Steak and Stinger restaurant.

Then he moved to Tallahassee in 1983, receiving a master’s degree in guitar from Florida State in 1986, and earned a doctoral degree from the University of Texas at Austin before the University of Texas at San Antonio hired him as a full-time guitar professor.

Meanwhile, Coccia, who studied sociology at SUNY Potsdam, earned a master’s degree in counseling from SUNY Oswego and a doctorate in educational administration from University of Texas at Austin before joining the Austin Community College staff in 1990. She eventually became a professor and chair of ACC’s Human Services Department, specializing in addiction treatment and counseling.

With an eye toward retirement, the couple had been returning to the Adirondacks for summer vacations for the past 10 years or so.

“We just started spending all of our time up here, so we started renting a place up here,” Dunne said.

Dunne took advantage of an early retirement offer at the end of the 2018-2019 school year, but Coccia was still working at ACC. They had built a house in Keene but couldn’t live here full time until Coccia retired and they sold their house in Texas. The plan was to settle down in Keene in June 2020. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit in mid-March 2020. They had already planned a three-day drive to Keene, bringing household items from their old house to the new one.

“We came here for spring break to bring a load of stuff up,” Dunne said. “And by the time we got here, the whole country had shut down. It was just the weirdest thing. We got in the car in Texas, started driving up, and that was the week … everything started shutting down. And by the time we got here, we realized we were not leaving.”

ACC shut down, so Coccia’s classes for the rest of the semester went virtual. They took a flight back to San Antonio to close on their house in April 2020. Other than that, they’ve been living in Keene since the beginning of the pandemic.

“We built a house here, and it wasn’t quite finished,” Dunne said. “The house itself was finished, but the basement was unfinished. So I decided to finish the basement while we were here during the pandemic. And that kept me busy for months.”

Now Dunne is getting involved in the local arts community. He’s on the Board of Directors for the East Branch Friends of the Arts, which is sponsoring The Accidental Trio concert on Aug. 14. The trio consists of Dunne on guitar and colleagues from Texas — Joan Carroll on vocals and Mark Rubinstein on accordion. The special guest will be Darrel Tidaback on the bass. There’s a suggested donation of $10, and students are free. The trio blends vocal jazz styles with some classic folk and pop in an intimate acoustic setting.