home

Today I overcame my aversion to picking up the phone and called Robin. Actually she had called me yesterday, but I was on my way to Connecticut and far from cell phone towers, so we couldn't talk very well.
She's in Denver! For all of 24 hours, she's in Denver. The feeling of strangeness and discolation she described very well seemed so familiar, and it made me realize how far I myself have come from those days in mid-March when absolutely everything was new and baffling and to be honest, frightening. It also made me realize how quickly we construct little worlds anew for ourselves, take shelter in our homey little routines that we hasten to establish.
I did not value this enough in North Carolina until it was all taken away from me. (Well, let's be truthful, nobody took it away from me.) I thought I did, but I did not.
I am feeling particularly reflective at this moment not just because it's my birthday or because I just had a glass of wine, although those are good reasons too, but for the first time since we have moved to Brooklyn we went somewhere overnight and came back. It was just a short of trip of about 24 hours, up to see my parents in the wilds of Litchfield County, but it was enough to give me a sense of getting away, of noticing how everything has changed.
For a start, I have not been to Connecticut in April since....I don't know, 1984? Is that possible? Spring is such a subtle thing in New England, it creeps up very slowly; it is completely different from spring in North Carolina, which has all the subtlety of a brass band playing a Sousa march, which is not to say it isn't nice in its own way. The point is, that had become normal for me. Being here in the North again, I am redisovering an old normal, the one I used to know, and it's not only about spring, but about many other things. The light, the look of things, the way people talk. The old graveyards with stone walls, the birch trees, the little hills that run together.
I feel like this is home. How is that possible, when North Carolina had become my home, had been so precious to me? And what, anyway, do I mean by "this"? Brooklyn? Connecicut? The North in general?