I have been on a hiatus, not completely by choice but definitely out of necessity. My partner and I moved at the beginning of the month; today marks three weeks. And it wasn’t just any move, we bought a building, inherited two lovely tenants, and are now the masters of our domain in Bridgeport, one neighborhood south of where we used to live in Pilsen (although my wife continuously reminds me that — according to her — we didn’t really live in Pilsen because we were too far east).  Either way, we moved and it was a big deal. Only it took me a while to see that.

There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort. ~Jane Austen

Funny how survival — or maybe stress and self-preservation instincts — work. I was so busy for weeks, maybe more than a month, thinking and planning and anticipating and packing and overall feeling upended that I didn’t allow the realness, the bigness, of our move sink in until now. Yes, I was sad to move — our old apartment was the place where we became newlyweds and went through a lot — and yes, I was excited to open up a new chapter in our lives, but I didn’t have time to sit and let it sink in, let it settle in my bones and have it really permeate and feel real until now. Now that we’re on Thanksgiving break and I have time to sit and just be, to look out the windows and walk through the rooms and feel the doorknobs in my hands and hang my coat in the closet and wipe down the counters, do all those tiny mundane things that hardly register as anything, I’ve gotten it. We’ve moved. I moved. And now I’m here. And I love it.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It’s such a pleasure to know that this small corner of the world is mine, is ours, and that we’ll be able to make plans and see them come true. And this will be its own form of magic — coming home.