other home.

Over the course of one week, the course of my life has changed significantly. I knew it was coming, more or less, but it has taken a good few days to get my head around it. In three weeks, I'm moving to a new city. I'm going for a new job I'm thrilled about and a new life with someone I love. I will be leaving behind four years of friendship and good life in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts was my first other home. It was the first time I set out on my own and made a place in the world for myself, where the good grace of love and community found me and a family of people chose me. That is something beautiful and precious and difficult to let go of. But there is more of it out there and, after a lifetime of moving, I have at least learned the valuable lesson that you never really leave behind the people and places you've known. They are always a part of you. And the ones that matter, the ones that inspire you and make you stronger and better, those ones last.

For three years, I lived in a big house full of people, in the woods of Wellfleet, where there are also beaches and ponds and tourists and long, quiet winters. For those three years, once a week, 14 people sat around a table and had a meal together, cooked by two of us. Sometimes the meal was late and everyone sat in the living room, crabby, waiting, and watching Jeopardy. Sometimes the nights were warm and we sat outside at the long picnic table until the mosquitoes drove us in. Some of the meals were terrible - soggy grilled cheese sandwiches and giant pots of plain white noodles. Some of the meals were epic. There was always the threat of scarcity. When you cook for 14 people, there is always the danger of not making quite enough. Some weeks, I'd had a long day and I could barely tolerate the chatter and noise and press of bodies around the table. Other weeks, I sat down, looked around the table and saw family. I think I will carry forever the beauty of this group meal. The urgency of being together, on good days and bad, the necessity of connecting with the people in your life. The love of food and the gratitude for a gift.

birds & escalator.

I am always cringing over my way of writing so abstractly. It is the safest and easiest way to write - it is also far removed from what is real.

I wrote a very long post tonight, in a word document, and it was crazy and about absolutely nothing. It was very pure stream-of-conscious nonsense. I had the feeling, which I get sometimes, that there is something something SOMETHING that I need to be writing about, but I can't seem to hit it. My hands shake, my arms clench, my shoulders get hot from all the muscles working. My heart races at the desperate need to create, though I hardly know what.

I deleted it all. It wasn't writing for the sake of a product, it was writing because my fingers just needed to move. But I bargained with myself, agreed that I could only delete it all if I wrote something else, here, for people to see.

But I'm not sure quite what to tell you.

I'm finding my voice and it feels right.
I'm noting stories that need to be told and I'm getting ready to tell them.
I am looking for my tribe, a lovely thought someone shared. My people are out there.
I am learning how to live through change and make the life I want.

death shudders.

There are some places that I live my life in. There are a couple of offices, the kind with humming fluorescent lights and fans and refrigerators. There are trains, the cars on the red line and the orange line and the green line. There's the bus home at night. There are low-lit rooms, a bedroom, a kitchen. And for the time being, these are the places that I am living out my days. There will be new places, different places, other places, coming days. I will carry some things along with me and others I will lose.

The clouds broke just now, just outside my window, and it has lightened my mood. The clouds have been very dark here, for days it seems. I saw a pink sunset over a church and I felt a little peace seep into my bones.

I have always had a strange relationship with place. I have always been desperate for it, but I'm never able to quite own it. If that doesn't make sense, I'm afraid I can't explain it any better. If it does, then our souls have the same longing and that makes me feel a bit less alone. And hopefully you the same.

What is strange is the goodbye. When I leave a place, I feel the same deep sadness each time. It is a sadness fueled by knowing that the next time I see those features, the landmarks, their light will have changed. I know well the feeling of looking at place where you were and knowing that you won't be there again. When my own sense of loss is so fierce, I often wonder how anyone can say goodbye to a childhood home or a place where they have lived for years. Perhaps it's only because I can't imagine it.