Watching the snow from a Providence window...

I remember winter in A's house in Providence.  It was right after he graduated, but I was still a college senior.  The apartment was not far from campus from the distances I am used to now - probably a 30 minute walk - but by how I felt at the time, it seemed absurdly far away.  Two things always struck me about visiting the house:  The first was how cold it was.  His roommates had decided that they should turn the thermostat down to 65 to save money on heat.  As a result, the living areas of the house were virtually unbearable, unless you were cooking in the kitchen or cuddling on the couch under a blanket.  The front area of the living room was a sunroom of sorts, and in the winter it felt almost unprotected from the cold.  One snowy evening, we sat there watching the snow, drinking port wine and hot chocolate and snuggling for warmth.  Still, A's room, which had a radiator, was one of the only warm places, and I would avoid leaving there, in part for the heat and in part because it was the only room in the house where I felt like I wasn't just a guest.

The second thing was how distant it felt.  This is the part that today I have a hard time understanding.  Being off campus (and noticeably so) made the house feel like a foray into the real world.  It was unsettling.   It felt like returning to the suburbs where I had grown up, even though I knew that life in Providence had little in common with my New Jersey upbringing.  Still, I feared that the sense of isolation I felt there, which I worried there was indicative of our future.  Most times I was there, I was waiting until I could go back to the areas surrounding campus.

Still, there are times I spent there that felt like home:  That time watching the snow; memories of cooking together in the too-small kitchen without a fan and looking out the window into the yard; talking to the young boy who just moved next door and didn't mind trying to make friends who were ten years older than him; the time A invited our friends over for a barbecue in April when it was still too cold to stay outside and grill.  Those memories are the first where I thought of us as a household.

I don't know why this memory is coming back to me all of a sudden.  Maybe it's because it finally snowed in DC and I can see the white glimmer of snow on our patio, reminding me of shoveling snow on A's old driveway and watching snow fall from his living room.  Maybe it comes from the process of buying a new place, which makes me think of all the earlier apartments where I've spent time and felt at home.  As a place where I first began to contemplate my adult life and what it might hold, it clearly left an impression on me.

Thoughts on Returning to New Jersey

If anyone had read this blog before I decided to reboot it, I'm trying a new format.  Here goes:

I remember this trip from so many times before: Struggling to carry all the bags into Port Authority, trying to find the right gate, negotiating with the bus driver over whether I could buy a ticket onboard.  The quiet evening ride through the Lincoln Tunnel and the breathtaking views of the city from the helix.  The familiar route down the highways.  When the driver gets close to your stop, you need to gather your things and walk up to the front of the bus so he remembers that he's making a stop.  He turns on the lights (the bus is otherwise dark), calls out the name of the stop, and lets you off at the side of the highway.  It's close to the exit to the residential neighborhood.  From there, it's a short walk down a few long, winding suburban blocks.  I've done this trip at least a hundred times before over the course of years - mostly commuting - but over the past five years, largely as part of the ritual of visit my childhood home.

This time, I mostly noticed the calm.  The highways that form the basis of transportation for the northern portion of this state (and which grind to a halt with holiday shopping traffic) are largely empty after midnight.  Even on the main roads, cars are rare.  Mostly, it's dark and quiet.  Growing up, my parents always acted as though the fact that you could hear the highway made the neighborhood undesirable.  In reality, you can only hear the highway because everything else is so silent - it's the same reason why I can hear the train whistle from three miles away as I type.

The walk is always interesting emotionally.  When I was in college, the contrast between school and home always felt antagonistic.  It was like I had to be careful - as though I didn't belong - but I was also at risk of getting sucked back.  Now, four years in DC, the relationship is different.  This was my home.  Was, not is.  Not in any way.  On the verge of potentially owning my own home hours away, this place has no draw left on me beyond memories.  This was the intersection where I would say goodbye to my friend after the walks we took to pass the time over breaks from college.  This was the house where one of my first crushes, a blond boy with a lighting bolt earring, lived when I was in kindergarten.  This is the hill where I would go sledding and the tennis court where I half-heartedly tried to learn the summer after senior year.  It's all very nice and peaceful.  And it isn't tied to me anymore.  I haven't been back here in nine months - next time could be a year from now.  Maybe growing up isn't about breaking ties with your past, but just losing any emotional ties to the point that the emotional register of this walk weighs less on my mind than the chill of winter on my neck and a pang of regret for losing my nice scarf over the course of the evening....