One Year Later: I Am Happy, and I Am Home

One year and four days ago, three men in a big green moving van drove up 72nd street, parked in front of our apartment building, loaded up our stuff, and prepared to drive it all north to our new house in White Plains, a Westchester County suburb of New York City.

One year and three days ago, after a mishap involving a dead battery, a failed trip to Home Depot for jumper cables, an unsuccessful attempt to get a new truck, an overnight stop in the moving company warehouse, and a night spent on the floor of our new bedroom, those three men parked that big green van in front of the new house and unloaded.

Surrounded by boxes in an unfamiliar house with a black hole where the kitchen used to be, I was anxious, adrift, and a little wild.

And so began my suburban journey.

Eventually the boxes were unpacked, the kitchen was finished, and I could drive from my house to the grocery store without my GPS.

Slowly, I began to miss Manhattan less, and even more slowly, the place that was so unfamiliar at first became our home.

Last November, as we were making the transition from old to new, I participated in National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo for short, a challenge to post something on your blog each and every day of the month. Posting on my blog for 30 days, as I was going through the worst of this transition saved my sanity. It helped me make sense of my life when I felt so unmoored, and it introduced me to some fabulous fellow bloggers whose comments bolstered me when I felt like I might buckle under the pressure of all of the new.

This month we are celebrating one year in our new home, and I am, once again, participating in NaBloPoMo with Yeah Write. And as much as I wanted to write last year about how hard our move out of Manhattan was, this year I want to write about how, suddenly, what was so new has become normal.

Check out my guest post on the Yeah Write NaBloPoMo grid today, where I remember our first Sunday in the new house, and write about what a difference a year makes.

It took me a long time to pull myself out of the sticky haze of sadness I felt when we left Manhattan, but one year later, I am happy, and I am home.