I've always been a wildly indecisive person, dipping my toes into all sorts of hobbies, projects, places. I used to think that meant I was irresponsible. It was something I tried to stifle inside myself, especially after I became a mother. Even before my journey through motherhood began, I held onto a promise to myself that I would never make my kids feel like an inconvenience, that a day would never come when they thought that my wants were more important than their needs. The further I get into my relationship with them, the more I see this is as a delicate tiptoeing act. You see, my spirit longs to sample each and every bit of life like sips of wine. Some are swallowed with a grimace, but I'm glad to have tasted them nonetheless. Some are savored, so I choose to return to them. Some have been stored away, waiting for the right season of life to be opened and tasted. Some are tasted in good company and some are kept secret until I can indulge in them without sharing. I've been a lot of things and seen a lot of things in the past, some are still tucked away and some were just a breath, gone now. I've always thought of our journey as a linear one and pushed the idea of it being a full circle out of my mind, not wanting to end up where I started.
Where I started never felt like home. We've already done this once. It feels like something beyond deja vu and more akin to time travel, like we might be redoing our time from before, a time I was comfortable not visiting with again. Everything is exactly the same as it was before, and yet nothing about us is remotely the same at all. It's the same place with the same people and the same culture that almost buried me alive, and I was so relieved to have made my way out, and now I'm here again. Sometimes I wake up wondering if we ever really left, or were the last five years all a dream? A surge of gratitude follows as I accept that it was in fact our life and I'm thankful for all of the happy memories from all of our places we've made home.
The first thing people ask me when we reconnect here is, 'Are you glad to be home?' I never really know what to say. A lot of times I just look at Alex and let him answer, most of the time I just shrug, 'sure,' but what I really want to say is, 'Nope!' or 'Please don't say home.' or 'I don't really want to talk about it.' The older I get the more I admire blunt honesty. The truth is, this is the hardest thing I'ver ever done. Some days I wake up and make the best of it. Most days I wake up angry and contemplate hauling this camper out of here and driving as far away as I can until the damn thing falls apart on the side of the road somewhere. Leading up to the move, I just emotionally detached myself from the reality of it and buried myself into the newborn phase. For six weeks or so, I was Switzerland, neutral. Then as I stood out on our patio of our Albuquerque apartment watching Alex put the last of our things into a moving truck, the dam broke. I passed the baby off and hid in the bathroom and let it all come out. It was only a year ago today that we even left Brooklyn and then there was reacquainting ourselves with Albuquerque, saying see you in four months, being pregnant in Missouri, becoming re-reaquainted with Albuquerque, then saying goodbye to the beautiful lady all over again. You see, I hadn't even had a chance to mourn Brooklyn properly, so when I say I've been an emotional mess the past few months, I mean it. I feel like I should have a perpetual 'I would rather be in Brooklyn.' bumper sticker stuck to my forehead - because I would, and I will, always. After the mourning passed, I resigned myself to anger and that's sort of where I've been camped out now for the last few months. It's a hard anger too - it's the kind that eats you up, but you have no one to be angry at except maybe yourself and no way to fix it. Along with that comes a lot of guilt because oh my goodness - how many times have I moved my kid around now? And this was not the way I wanted to spend our first year with a new human in our family.
This is what we're meant to be doing, of course - building a home, giving our kids something stable, planting ourselves in a place where they can run barefoot and wild - and I've always known it, but it's confusing. Our barefoot and wild place was supposed to be off the coast of Washington, deep in the Oregon forest, or out in the beauty of Alaska - not among the haunts of our childhood. Does this mean I failed? I left with no intention of coming back, but here I am. We fought our way to Albuquerque and it effortlessly felt like home. We fought our way through Brooklyn and there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not reminded of her from some otherworldly force out there. No matter how hard I try, I will always wake up wishing I was in Brooklyn. So, I guess I've learned that home is wherever you fight like hell to be. I've been doing an awful lot of fighting here, so maybe this will come to feel like home after all.
When I set out to (re)name this little space, we were in the beginning stages of moving to Brooklyn. I knew the kind of 'feel' I wanted the name to have, the image I wanted it to portray, how it would sound when I said it, that it would represent our family values in some way - it would say in a subtle way, 'This is who we are!' I even knew it should be four words because I'm a symmetry freak. It took me months of pondering to arrive at The Long Way Home. I was on a wandering walk through our old neighborhood, pushing Ev along in front of me when I asked her if she wanted to take the long way home - and it stuck. I came up with several others that escape me now, but finally decided, much like naming my children, that this space couldn't be anything but The Long Way Home. Little did I know how ironic this name would come to be.
It's painfully obvious even to this day, but I loved living in Brooklyn. I loved our quiet little apartment on our quiet little street. I love that it always looked thrown together no matter where you put anything. I loved that our mattress was on the floor right next to Evie's and we used to fall asleep holding hands under my pillow. I loved the old hardwood floors that used to frustrate her to no end as she'd try to stack block upon block and they would fall no matter how careful she was. So she'd gather them all up and stake her claim on a different, hopefully flatter piece of floor with a determined and slightly concerned look on her face. I loved our insanely pricey rent that felt like a bargain compared to the rest of the city, mostly because we had a real kitchen. I loved listening to the city come alive each morning and watching our brick wall view turn a golden hue that only fellow Brooklyn-dwellers have seen. I loved using the word 'bodega.' I loved the corner cafe with $20 sandwiches and cereal bowls of coffee. I loved our tiny mailbox and our obnoxious door buzzer. I loved the bagels. Oh, how I loved the bagels. I loved being able to buy a slice of pizza for a dollar. I loved the way the guys at our favorite pizza place said mozzarella. I loved that our church was held in a school auditorium. I loved that we gathered in people's impossibly small apartments during the week. I loved the Manhattan view we'd get on our grocery shopping nights leaving Fairway. I loved and hated Fairway. I loved that everyone had a love/hate relationship with the city. I loved our watermelon picnics. I loved that the playground was never empty the entire time we lived there. There was always someone there for Ev to play with.
I loved the subway smell. I loved the R train, the consistently late R train. I admired that about her, I accepted it because I'm consistently late anywhere I go. I loved that we lived at the end of the line and knew we were home when we heard, 'This is the last stop on this train. Please leave the train. Thank you for riding with MTA New York City transit.' I even sort of loved feeling like steamed broccoli in the Summer heat. I loved our secret Staten Island beach spots with oily water and sand full of trash. I loved the handfuls of sea glass we'd walk away with. I loved walking miles to get anywhere. I loved the street sweeping day, car moving scramble that happened each week. I loved the sidewalk horses that Evie went nuts over. I loved New Yorkers and their constant use of the F word. I loved how people really lived in the Spring, Summer, and Fall because the Winters were so unbearable. I loved that you could go for a simple walk and never be bored. I loved how beauty could find you in the most unexpected places. I loved our view of the Verrazano and watching boats pass by on the Hudson. I loved how people celebrated their New York-iversary. I loved that people complained so much about living there, but refused to live anywhere else. As Anne Lamott says, '. . . [I loved] the feel of being part of a healthy mob, part of a pulse, part of a collective heartbeat. . . [I loved] what it felt like to be part of a huge struggle, where people were winning and losing and triumphing and being humiliated and for once it wasn't you.' I love how living there was kind of like childbirth - after a while you forget how hard it was. I loved it all. I would be a lifer. Sometimes I lay in bed and imagine walking along those Bay Ridge streets with my two kids. It's hard for me to comprehend that a place that is so much a part of me, will never be a part of both of my kids. I sometimes forget Noble wasn't there with us.
As much as I loved Brooklyn, there is a bit of my soul that is nourished by New Mexico. I love the sunsets, each one different from the all the rest, but beautiful in a way you'll never forget. I love the adobe houses with turquoise trim. I love that you get to experience all four seasons, but you really only have to experience snow when you feel like driving up the mountain. I love the freakishly bipolar Spring weather. I love the Cottonwoods. I love that the days are so consistently beautiful that you wake up never thinking about what the weather will be like. I love the Christmas luminarias. I love the old man at the farmer's market that never stops shouting, 'Fresh tortillas!' in his Spanish accent. I love that you can tell what neighborhood you're in by how many Subarus are around. I love their strange exclamations like 'Eeee!' and 'Ah-la!' I love when someone calls Evie 'mija.' I love the trees outside our window that Noble strains his neck to watch from the rocking chair. I love the bike lanes and trails scattered all over the city. I love the love that the lifers have for this city and the effort they put in to keep it quirky. I love living three blocks from the zoo and that it's basically become our backyard. I love that we're surrounded by so much beauty and mountains are always in our background. We'd never make it through our 'places to see' list if we lived here for a lifetime. I love that feeling I get when we're coming home from the East and we spot the mountain silhoettes off in the distance. I love that you can wear whatever you want here and no one will look twice. I love that you can practically wear sandals year round and most people do. I love the frequent Indian Summers in the middle of Winter. I love that it's never hard to find something interesting to do here. I even kind of love the lack of a good Chinese food place. I love that the vast majority of people embrace local, organic food. I love the ridiculous amount of breweries and that you can buy craft beer almost anywhere. I love that both of my babies' birth certificates say 'Albuquerque, New Mexico,' a place where people are advocating for a mother's right to birth the way she wants. I love that that this place will always be a part of them no matter where we go - it called us back twice after all. There must be something special here for them. Even though there is so much to love about each place we've lived, we've known that they all wouldn't be forever.
On the Friday before last we stood in our empty little Brooklyn apartment and said our goodbyes - to the quirky front door that made entirely too much noise when you shut it, to the kitchen where our meals and practically all of our memories were made, to the bedroom we spent many nights in, holding hands across mattresses and listening to the city below, and to the holes in the ceiling that we managed to laugh about for months. Leaving seemed a little sudden, even to us, but it was something we had known was coming. I love writing our story down here, but this has been something that I felt I needed to process in my own time, my own way, and I'm still not quite ready to give the world an explanation. What I am ready to share here is how good it feels to be back in a place that feels like home. As soon as we saw those mountains silhouetted by a Southwest sunset, our bodies all just breathed a sigh of relief. Brooklyn was a really good time for our family and it will always have been worth it, but it was also one of the hardest times. Since leaving, we've been spontaneously assembling a list of things we learned while living there - No distance is ever too far to walk. New Yorkers have a unique skill for using the F word - I've never heard that word used in so many ways, so many times in one sentence in all my life. Soda water is underrated. Grocery shopping is the single most challenging thing you can do in the city, besides moving. Brokers are people of the most horrible kind. The largest city in the country doesn't feel so big once you live there.
I'll never forget our last night there spent walking through our neighborhood, eating a late dinner at the pizza place it took us a few trial runs to find, and falling asleep together on the air mattress with views of the Freedom Tower beams shooting through the sky out our window. We have so many good memories to hold onto of our time spent in the city, but it still feels really good to be back in New Mexico. There's no doubt that Brooklyn will always be a part of us. Even children we haven't had yet will hear the tales of Brooklyn from us and will feel a connection to this place that other people don't have. There will always be a little part of me wandering the streets of the city, pushing that stroller along, on our next city adventure. Since coming back to Albuquerque, we've spent the majority of our time visiting with old friends, soaking up the Southwest sun during the day, and admiring the stars at night. We're staying with some beautiful friends of ours while we sort out the finer details of our lives, so we're still in limbo a bit, but we're finding peace in already feeling fairly settled in our lives here. It took mere minutes for us to look at each other with big smiles on our faces and say, 'It feels right.' We've been talking of our plans and all we really want to do is plant some roots, make a home, and raise some babies. So here's to that, the end of a memorable chapter, and the beginning of a new and hopeful one.
morning view from the fire escape • breakfast time • morning light • beauty on our walk • bubbles with a friend • chats with Papa after he comes home from work • a whole lot of joy for only two quarters • beauty on an evening walk • alone time • good night, Brooklyn
I almost labeled this 'a sarcastic home tour.' I got an email the other day from someone asking me to post a tour of our apartment. I was drinking coffee at the moment - hot coffee, and it most definitely came out of my nose. We love this place. We love our neighborhood. We love living here. It feels like a dream come true every morning that I wake up here, but it isn't home yet. We haven't had the energy or finances to make it home yet, but it has some fantastic potential. I can picture it all and that's what keeps me from ugly crying in our living room floor on our only piece of furniture.
At random intervals through out the day, our goings-on (going-ons?) are accompanied by the background noise of an annoying car alarm, but not just any annoying car alarm.
This has become our reality. The first time we heard it, we looked at each other with stunned faces and shouted 'IT'S LILY'S CAR ALARM!' and ran to the window. Why we ran to the window, I'm not sure. We couldn't see the car. Our view never changes. It's always this. . .
. . .or this. . .
. . .or this.
And yes, our windows are extremely dirty.
After we'd heard the alarm a handful of times, we started to get annoyed and talk about how pointless car alarms were. Now you can find us standing in the kitchen, cooking dinner, woo-wooing along with the car alarm. What city living does to people is quite fascinating. You just have to embrace it all to stay sane.
Three weeks after we moved into the apartment, 48 hours of unending torrential rain made it's way through our ceiling. It was like the diamond cave in The Rescuers. We had almost every dish out of our cabinets and scattered around. It got so bad that we had to call the super and even he was a bit worried and brought us a five gallon bucket and a bag of thrift store t-shirts to put in the places we had run out of containers. We laughed it off for the first few hours, but started to get worried when chunks of plaster started to fall from our ceiling. The holes are still there a month and a half later and plaster sporadically falls from the holes. We usually just look up, look at each other, and shrug. New York City landlords are quite fascinating too. I say all of this for the sake of transparency (and a tad bit for humor). Moving to New York City always sounds glamorous, but for the majority of the people that move here, this is what your beginning is like. Almost anyone you talk to can tell you, with a smile on their face, about their first small, probably-should-have-been-condemned apartment and first year or two of struggling. It's sort of a rite of passage. I can't with any conscience argue for New York City with anyone. My love for this place is irrational. The fact that anyone moves here is irrational.
Our floors are fascinatingly uneven. When Evie pours her blocks out all at once, they scatter and roll in different directions (mostly under the couch, of course). We like to laugh about this too because it also reminds us of Lily and Marshall's apartment they buy. (If you couldn't tell yet, we're big fans of HIMYM.) You could probably start at one end of the apartment and roll to the other side on a skateboard without ever letting your feet touch the ground. Ev likes to build 'tall towahs' with her blocks. You can watch her try to set one up, have three blocks stacked that continue to fall, look intently at the floor, then move it all to a different (flatter) spot because she's figured out the floor must be crooked.
Every night, at the same time, the people up stairs watch the news at what I'm sure is the highest volume level their TV reaches. This annoyed us for the first few weeks we lived here. Now it's become a sort of comfort. All is right with the world if the news comes on upstairs around 8:30.
The state of our furniture is amusing. Our bedroom looks like a campground - two mattresses pushed together and a bike propped in the corner. Our living room has a couch in it, a poor couch that has been through so much. We bought the old girl four years ago, right after we were married, living in an apartment in Birmingham smaller than a single room in this apartment. It has traversed it's way across the country twice and lived in four different houses and is mauled by a baby daily and needs replaced badly. In said living room there is also a plank of wood set on two sawhorses to serve as my sewing table. No, I'm not kidding. You can't make this stuff up.
Three of the most important things that I noticed our first day here, all of which have to do with my love for Breakfast at Tiffany's: We have an intercom box thingy that buzzes people in. I can never hear anybody on the blasted thing, but it makes me happy. Sometimes I won't be expecting anyone, but it will buzz and I will press the talk button, 'Hello?' then I will forget to press the listen button and wonder why no one is responding, so then I hello them again - I don't know why I bother because all I hear is 'wahh wahh wahh wuh wah,' like Charlie Brown's teacher. So I hope it isn't a serial killer and push the button to let them in anyway. I hold it for a whole ten seconds or something because I never know how long it takes for someone to open the door and every time someone buzzes me in the door locks again just as I pull on the handle and I have to annoy the person with that dreadful 'buzzzzzz' again. Why isn't the listen button just built in you ask? Who wants to talk without listening immediately afterwards? Who knows. Anytime I need buzzed in (I've said buzz so many times, I'm wondering if there's a different technical term for it?) I always want Alex to yell, 'HOLLY GORIGHTRY! You distuhb me! You must get another key made!' and then I will respond with, 'It won't do any good, darling. I'll just lose them all!' Sometimes he plays along, but most of the time he looks at me like I've finally lost it and asks, 'What is that from?' just to annoy me.
In our lobby there are tiny mailboxes all in a row. Someday soon I will hide my lipstick in there and paste a small mirror to the back, even though I hardly ever wear lipstick. We've lived here for two months and have gotten approximately three pieces of mail, so I called the post office to see what the deal was. The slightly loud and rude lady asks me if my name was on the mailbox. I said no because I've never had to write my name on any of my mailboxes before. It has my apartment number on it after all and some foreign guy's last name on it who lived here before us, so I guess that can be confusing, but HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT?! It seems she thought I was as dumb as a rock for not putting my name on the mailbox and expecting to get mail, but we keep getting mail for people who don't live here anymore, so what's up with that? My grudge for the USPS worsens.
We also have a fire escape. A few days after we had been here and Ev had fallen asleep, we decided to climb out our window and sit on the fire escape so Alex could smoke a cigar. I don't know why he sporadically thinks smoking a cigar is a good idea because I always ask him if it was good and he always replies with, 'Eh.' Anyway, sitting on the fire escape scared the living day lights out of me and I was a nervous wreck the entire time - but to complete the Breakfast at Tiffany's dream I've always had in my head, I'm determined to curb my fear and play Moon River on a ukulele out there, even if it's only once. I'm also determined to one day own a claw foot bathtub couch and keep my phone in a suitcase.
Showering here is like showering at Summer camp. You never know what's going to happen in that shower. You get the temperature just right and then a squirrel climbs up the rain gutter or a pigeon lands on the roof and it's gone, your perfect temperature has now turned to boiling with no warning whatsoever. The water doesn't change like this at any of the sinks, however, so we're thinking of changing the handles. It probably won't fix anything, but it will make is feel like we're being proactive. Also, whoever hung the curtain rod for the shower curtain hung it just a few inches too high, so it's impossible to find a curtain long enough. We've given up and just let water drip off the bottom of the curtain wherever it wants. The bathroom is completely tile after all, which is strictly a New York City thing. No where else that I know of do people tile the bathroom completely. I believe they would have tiled the ceiling if they could have.
After we had lived here for a few weeks, I got bored and decided to clean the stove knobs. They were plastered with other people's food gunk and I thought I would soak them and scrub them with washing soda. I scrubbed all the numbers off and it's made a new game out of finding the right oven temperature when you want to bake something. Now that we've figured out some of the temperatures, the husband decided to muster up his worst handwriting and take a permanent marker to the knob.
Our fridge is an 'apartment' sized fridge - not mini, but not full sized - but it's in a full sized hole. Our kitchen is seriously huge for a NYC apartment, so I wonder, do they only sell apartment sized fridges in this city? Is that why our fridge is thrown in this full sized fridge hole all willy nilly like? We obviously had a full sized fridge in our house in Albuquerque and it was always full, even if we didn't have anything to eat. It has now become one of the greatest mysteries of my life because this 'apartment sized' fridge is never full. It's impossible to even fake it being full. We bought $250 in groceries almost as a test and that didn't even fill it up. I'm constantly wondering what I did with all that prime fridge real estate back in Albuquerque.
Our super's name is Sammy and he is a black man that only speaks Spanish, which really threw me off the first time we met. Ev thinks he's the best thing since sliced bread. Anytime we go down stairs, 'Where Sammy? Where Sammy, Mama?' If she happens to see him she chuckles and says, "Saammmmaayyy!' and he chuckles right back. The lovely man also carries the stroller up the steps for me anytime he can and that's pretty much the sweetest thing you can do for a Mama in this city.
Thank you for touring our lovely abode. Souvenir pictures can be purchased at the booth on your way out.
I have about a dozen draft posts just sitting in a folder. Every now and then I browse through them and regret not finding the time because they are precious memories and I know if they aren't documented here, they probably won't be remembered. The pictures will always be there, but words really do bring the pictures to life. I do my best to catch up, but a few always slip through the cracks and I run out of time/the relevancy has passed or I struggled too hard for too long to find the words and focus to finish. I try to make sure that I'm writing here even if life is busy because I know that my soul finds peace in pouring out our lives on these pages. If I'm not writing, then those thoughts are piling up in the corners of my mind and I feel cluttered and uninspired. I guess you could say life gets in the way of blogging sometimes. It's a good thing, to be so wrapped up in each other that you forget to write it all down, but it also helps me keep things in perspective when daily life is just not enthusing me. A few months ago, I entered a giveaway over at Hey Natalie Jean for a six month membership to How About We for Couples and I was super ecstatic to win. I mean what better time to win six planned outings than the month you're moving to a new city?! With the membership you get a free date each month and this month is month number two. Last month we went to Station in Williamsburg for sliders, fries, whiskey, and table side s'mores.
Even before we had children, we knew we would be those parents that bring their child(ren) along on all of our adventures. We've been here a short time, but it's already obvious that most people in this city are surprised by this. It made me uncomfortable for a brief moment, but it's just one of those things we feel strongly about, so we brush it off and keep doing what works for us. Don't get me wrong, a date night sounds heavenly, but there's magic in making memories as an entire family that I'm not willing to sacrifice every time we go out. So we threw Ev in the carrier and subway-hopped across Brooklyn all the way over to Williamsburg. Alex and I snacked on some delicious sliders and fries and sipped on beer and whiskey while Ev had a bowl of tomato soup all to herself. When I was looking at this date on the How About We website, the food and atmosphere sounded fantastic, but because I'm still a kid at heart, the s'mores were what I was really after and I knew Ev would love them too. She was ecstatic about the marshmallows and chocolate separately, but promptly pushed the graham crackers away, which is what everyone else really wants to do when they're eating s'mores if we're honest. I wasn't sure about this being a kid friendly date at first, but we ended up having a really fun night together. The food was tasty, Alex and I got to have a smidgen of an adult conversation, and there were no meltdowns to be had by the two year old - success.
Spring is a strange season. I feel like anywhere you live, you can never nail it down. Spring weather is never consistent. It's blustery and rainy, and that's Spring. It's borderline Winter, but everyone is too stubborn to let their Spring expectations go so they just carry their coats begrudgingly, refusing to actually wear them and hiding their shivers, and that's Spring. It's overcast all day, but not a drop of rain has fallen from the sky, and that's Spring. But on this day, Thursday, it was the perfect Spring. It was what you expect Spring to be. It was the reason people live through Winter kind of Spring. The more seasons that I encounter, the more I learn to appreciate things about each season and the more I'm convinced that it's all about perspective. The only season I might never make peace with is Winter. The wool socks and hot chocolate and fluffy coats and snow and rest is all nice until Christmas, then I'm ready to go outside again and there's still three months left of crap weather. Anyway, perspective - I was a little disappointed this year when 'Spring' came around, yet it didn't feel like Spring at all. Blossoms were swirling and tulips were blooming and trees were budding, but the skies were gray and the wind was blustery. So I just decided to let Spring off the hook and tell her she could be whoever she wants to be, I won't judge, and that has made all the difference. I wake up without expectations, dress for the weather, and head outside no matter what. It's made for some interesting moments like getting caught in a downpour and sling-shotting my kid out of her stroller onto the sidewalk, but Spring and I, we're learning to love each other unconditionally.
Any day that involves sitting in the shade and doing absolutely nothing important is a good one in my book, and that's exactly what we did. I'm also convinced that food tastes better outside - we packed up some tuna salad pitas, half of a watermelon, and grape chia kombucha and polished it all off in twenty minutes. I've had plans to buy some swanky picnic gear to make our picnic outings feel like something out of a Disney movie, but it's bills or swanky picnic gear, so bills, I guess. I always seem to get in a funk when the seasons change, but I'm feeling surprisingly optimistic and inspired these days with a little touch of 'There's not enough time in the day.' Something about Spring just makes me want to write pages of goals, goals I didn't even knew I had!
When I was young and in love with this city and a boy who I never imagined would end up my husband, much less living this dream with me, my mind was obsessed with what it would feel like to come home to New York City for the first time. Before we packed up our lives in a little box on wheels and traipsed across the country, I had been here a total of three times. I've never really believed in love at first sight except for the ability to love or not love this city upon first meeting. This city isn't a place you grow to love - you're either infatuated or not. Alex had been here once, three months before we left Albuquerque. Typing that out makes me realize how ludicrous that sounds, but it always felt right. I like to think NYC has a knack for that, guiding people in who are meant to be here. I'm convinced that fate calls New York City home. You can feel it when you wander the streets. I feel like things must be better in this city, like all you have to do is whisper your hopes and dreams up past the skyscrapers and over the rivers and the city gives you little glimpses of beauty to help you along your way.
I feel the need to write about what it was actually like coming home to this city for the first time. We came across the Verrazano Bridge and drifted off to the right, following signs for 92 Street - not 92nd - the sign says 92. As we pulled up to a red light, ready to turn onto our street, I just laughed to myself in disbelief and looked out the passenger side window at Brooklyn, the Brooklyn. Alex looked at me with tired eyes and a grin spread across his face. Laughing for no other reason than exhaustion, he took a break to ask me what I was laughing about. I took a moment to think of the right words and couldn't - 'this, this isn't the way I imagined it would be.' He asked what was different. I motioned to Evie in the back seat, 'Well she wasn't supposed to be here and I never really thought it would be you in that seat.' He looked forward and drove through the light, stopping again after moving just a few feet. 'Is that ok? Are you disappointed?' I smiled, 'Not at all.' I hung onto this dream for a long time, carried it around with me everywhere I went through many seasons of life and just as I was ready to let it go and make peace with it never happening, the stars aligned. Here I am and the waiting was more productive than I thought - I get to share this with them.
I never really knew why I wanted to be here or what I would do when I finally made it here, but I did know I wanted to wander. It was almost like that's all that was calling me here - the ability to endlessly wander. I haven't even had a chance to walk through Manhattan much, which is where I always imagined I would wander, and I'm satisfied. I can walk the same street every day just a few blocks from our house and I feel like I accomplished something life changing. Beauty saturates this place, but not in the most obvious of ways, which makes the snippets of beauty all the more important for me to savor. So this is the beginning of a series, a seed that I've held in my pocket for years and man, it feels good to finally take it out and put it in the ground.
