Four Years

Four years ago today I arrived in Brooklyn with my family. It was snowy and cold, and they were working on the power on our street so the building was dark when we entered. Neighbors heard us come in and greeted us in the hallway, putting flashlights in our hands. The girls were 3 years old and 4 months old, and all three of us had stomach viruses and colds simultaneously. I had been sick with one thing after another for the four months since Lucy's birth, and I struggled up the stairs to our third-floor walk-up feeling so weak.

We didn't know if it would work out, or if our Urban Living Experiment would crash and burn, sending us back to the suburbs with our tails between our legs. I didn't know what I would write, or how I would find the time around caring for the girls, just that I had to write. Something. Sometime. I didn't know if I would make friends or if this big city would eat my hopeful and innocent self alive.

Today I feel very quiet, the way you get when you're observing a sacred day. I am full of remembrances and I feel this, I don't know, significance I guess, around every small moment from then until now. If anyone had told me four years ago all that would happen and unfold in these few short years, I would have had to lie down--the weight of my disbelief would have been too heavy to bear.

My gratitude now is equally large, for this city, for the friends who brighten my days and the community that lights up my nights, and for who I get to be here. For all the ways that trusting ourselves led us truly, like following an inner north star. For finding a right place with which to share my life, which for me was every bit as important as finding a right person with whom to do the same.

I love you, New York.