hold your breath: the mountains will find you, probably over the next hill

Just now, I am supposed to be putting new shelf paper in my new kitchen cabinets. The eastern sun (up over the Bridger range) is slatting itself in long pale lines between the living room blinds across the carpet, and I am sitting in its glow.

Since I last updated this blog, I have been to London and back (photos of Oxford on facebook! or a few here!), and J and finally decided for sure to spend a sabbatical year or so out west (recognizing that we won't always have this freedom), and we packed up our Chicago apartment and said our goodbyes and drove toward the setting sun. For three days. The third day we drove for 17 hours.

And suddenly, here we are. In an apartment filled with boxes, with tiles in the kitchen that have little acorns and mushrooms on some of them, in a neighborhood that is 70% college students, with a view of trees from our windows and mountains every time we take the garbage out.

Already, I am teary with the missing of: friends around every corner, the dearly familiar market down Morse Avenue, Thursday afternoon play dates, Lake Michigan's wide and wise expanse. But I am also hopeful about this place, thankful for its chill morning and evening air even after 90-degree days, friends who offer to bring over dinner on our first night here, family here (and the friends of that family! who show up to unload a stranger's moving truck!), the promise of Shakespeare in the Park tonight, within walking distance. And the man sitting across the room (working towards a writing deadline planned before this move), haloed in that generous morning sun. Here we find ourselves, resting after the journey: breathing in the journey.