The first two weeks

It's hard to believe that I am coming up on the end of my second week at home. Some days, the routine and quotidian demands and ongoing annoyances of a cross-country move keep me from really pondering on the profundity of all that's happened. And then there are some moments when reality slams into me and it's oh holy cow, how did I manage to make this my life again?

I reckon I spent so long being unhappy and missing it here, I forced myself to think that it would never be different.

Anyway. Here are a few highlights...


The Homecoming:

I rolled into town around rush hour--ha, "rush hour"--and immediately made tracks for the place where I'm now living. Within two hours, I was vegging out on the couch with my friend/slumlord, eating pizza, watching Archer, and trying to coax the kitties out of the various improbable hidey-holes they managed to winkle themselves into.


The Home: 

I love where I am living. Slowly (slower still because of the dickhole jerkface movers) I am nesting and trying to light the home fires.  Like the last place I lived, this is the perfect set-up. My friend/slumlord travels quite a bit, so I have been rattling about the townhouse on my own. My window overlooks the front of the house and the surrounding homes, and it's pretty much idyllic. The cats are settling in, and so am I. 

The Family and Friends:
I left Indiana right around the time that MySpace, and not long after that, Facebook, became The Thing. And say what you want about the pervasiveness of technology, the shallowness of social media, etc.--Facebook has been an absolute godsend to me. I've kept my Indiana ties strong in part because of it, was able to see lots of folks and keep in touch and easily make plans on my vacations. (And, ahem, maybe send the occasional very tipsily honest late-night Facebook message.) And so when I came home, it wasn't long before folks came calling, and they have all been sources of warmth, laughter, relieved smiles, and good-humored agreements to my various crackpot plans.

One especially fun evening, my friends Michael and Anna (Manna!) 

came over to help me assemble various pieces of crappy furniture...which basically

 meant that Michael assembled the furniture while Anna and I drank cider and heckled him. 

Right after I landed, it was Easter, so I headed over to Manna's to spend the evening with them. In my long-proclaimed but little-exercised status as Crazy Aunt Mel, I helped their son, Wesley, and their friends' daughter Lucy, dye Easter eggs, and I quickly learned a valuable lesson: when parents are presented with a remotely responsible adult to help out with the children, the parents do have a way of mysteriously disappearing. Can't say as I blame them--it's a chance for them to have adult quiet time!

Wesley is demonstrating how we could decorate our eggs. "This is just an egg-sample," 

he says helpfully, and of course his pun-loving dad heartily approved.

After our Easter dinner (homemade focaccia pizza) we noticed that the weather was turning stormy, so I took off after that pretty sharpish. Which brings us to...


The Weather:

Not five minutes after leaving, the storm whooshed in--storms here move so quickly--and I was startled by a loud bang on the car roof. Hail! I can't remember ever having driven through a hail storm--and it was harder than driving through any rain or fog. Visibility was awful, and I was terrified that some baseball-sized chunk of frozen death would crack my windshield.

Both myself and my beleaguered car finally made it home unscathed, and we were welcomed back by a hearty layer of the hail, all over the block.

Since then, we've had wind, rain, freezing nights, and beautiful spring days. My favorites, of course, are the ominous storms that come up so quickly and leave you breathless with equal parts dread and excitement.

Food:

AUUUUURGH, the food! As one of my Indy friends put it, "there's no reason NOT to eat locally-grown things." She's right, of course, given all of the farms around here. I don't know that I can taste a difference, Philistine that I am, but it seems like there are so many restaurants that are local affairs, that take pride in pretentiously delicious dishes. Most memorable food so far: strawberry shortcake from Louie's Wine Dive, and the fried green tomato BLT from Sweetgrass.

Except...I'm trying to a bit of cooking myself, and made a "lightened up" broccoli-cheese soup that was absolutely delicious! It's lovely to live in a chilly place where I can cook and eat comfort foods like this.

There are so many other things that I could wax ecstatic upon--the seasons, the architecture, my new job, the plans that I'm hatching for the life ahead of me. But for now, I think I shall heat up the last of that delicious soup and contemplate the rainy day that is supposed to come along tomorrow.

This is what blessed, peaceful bliss feels like.