Home Sweet Home

Since leaving home as a teenager, I’ve lived in many different places, including (but not limited to):

• A Boro Park basement studio so small my toes dangled under the tiny table when I lay in bed, and the fridge door opened into the bathroom
• A bedroom in the attic of a family friend
• A Flatbush attic, shared with three Bais Yaakov girls, who were counting the seconds until their chassonim swept them off their feet
• A bedroom in the Tennessee home of a half-hearted ger
• A Flatbush basement apartment, catty corner with another apartment occupied by “Joe,” a man whose accent tagged him as “Yoely”
• A Flatbush apartment with a spiral staircase that may or may not have been haunted by ghosts
• A room in Seagate, kitchen and bathroom shared with a member of the army reserves
• An apartment in Prospect Heights, shared with a pseudo-idealist and a Japanese actor
• A wooden crate suspended from the ceiling of a loft in Williamsburg, center area shared with two aging rock ‘n roll musicians, bathrooms shared with a yoga teacher, a personal trainer from Joisey, a smoking hot male model from New Zealand and a guy who built robots
• An attic in Bedsty, shared with a yoga devotee, that occasionally lost all power (the apartment, not the roommate) and occasionally featured gun shot soundscapes
• A Park Slope apartment, shared with a movie maker and a precociously intense political devotee
• An apartment in a Flatbush apartment building, packed tight with the visual, aural and olfactory artifacts of a thousand Russian babushkes
• A bedraggled apartment at the edge of a college town
• Half of the second floor of a historic house in the boondocks of New Jersey, visited by deer and vultures
• A carriage house in the suburbs
• A mold-dappled studio in New Jersey

My husband and I bought an apartment a few months ago, and we’ve been hopping from (mouse infested) sublet to (shreiky hipster party-central/24hr liquor store/crackhead hangout block) sublet, while renovations on the place moved forward at a glacial pace. Finally, this weekend, we moved in to our own apartment.

Home sweet home.

We don’t have a kitchen (yet), wires dangle from the ceiling, the walls are coated in dust, the floors covered in plastic, and 50% of the house is blocked off with a wooden partition as the crew continues to work – but we’re home. A place no one can take from me, no one can kick me out of, a place to always come back to. A place of permanence.