I’ve been feeling challenged by our new neighborhood. In New York you can move a couple of miles and be in a different world. And I am.

Our part of Crown Heights is mainly Caribbean and the corner stores carry unfamiliar foods: stacks of dried fish, pickled meats in open buckets, eight kinds of yam, as well as roots I don’t recognize. Things smell strange to me, and I don’t feel at home.

Last Saturday we were plopped on the couch, watching TV, when we heard gun shots. I turned to M and said “There’s nothing else that sounds like that, right?” When we looked out the window there were people hanging out on the street corner, chatting. Some cops ran by. Street life continued. End of story.

When I traveled in Italy, I kept trying to figure out whether the people yelling in the street were fighting. I’m doing the same thing here, struggling to understand what the street life dynamics are. I don’t so much feel unsafe as unskilled. I don’t understand what’s going on around me, I can’t read the signs, it’s as if I don’t know the language, and I can’t quite relax.

A friend told me that in every place she’s moved to – “EVERY place”, she repeated – she has felt like she’s made a terrible mistake and simply won’t be able to tolerate living there.

I don’t feel that way. I love the apartment, and there’s no question that it was the right choice to move here. But I can’t stop vigilantly attempting to understand what is going on around me. I want to make the pieces of this new world fit so that I can file them away and stop paying attention. I think it’s going to take me a while, like learning a new language.

A few things are seeing the light of day.

I’m enjoying my familiar objects, even while they’re stacked up waiting to find their proper place.

I reaaaaally want to make something, but all my stuff – beads, yarn, fabric – is in boxes. And that would entail unpacking, which would require moving furniture into place, which is heavy and frustrating and feels like that game where you move the little squares around to make a picture. Pfft. Forget that. I’ll just weave through the piles to get to my computer and read happy crafty blogs all day.

Today’s find was the nerd and the needles, and yummy pictures of traditional Norwegian mittens.

I want to knit those little people soooo bad. Might have to go unpack a box…

This is my world.

I’m a little overwhelmed. Actually, more than a little.

More overwhelmed than the cats, who don’t have to unpack. After spending the first 2 days wedged under the bed they are now revved up and feisty, fueled by their pride in their own tremendous courage.

Annabelle discovered the big window sill in the kitchen – witness her doing her happy stretch – then she twigged and ran around checking all the other windows in the apartment. Sure enough, all have big sills. Happy, happy cat.

Wolfie has followed and is a keen pigeon-watcher.

Moving day was very rough, but it’s over now. There are little pathways carved amongst the piles of stuff. My computer is set up. Things are slowly, slowly falling into place. And despite the chaos and trauma of transition, I really love my new home.

This is it. This is the week when the horrible reality of moving hits home. All I want to do is write show ‘n tell posts about stuff I’m unearthing as I pack, or maybe make a little You Tube movie about how the cats are coping with the stress. Anything really. Anything to avoid packing, and packing, and packing…

But I’m a big girl and when push comes to shove I can set myself a boundary. No more blog reading. No posting this week. Got to get me to the new place and then we can have fun with the stuff when it comes OUT of the boxes.

See you on the other side!

“Are we there yet?”

Saturday was the farmers market at McCarren Park. There was a live band playing; I saw a toddler doing the butt-squat dance.

There were lines for fresh milk and for chicken. I bought tomatoes and corn. It felt like taking a tiny, colorful, glorious vacation.

I’m packing everything I own. I thought that for someone who reads a lot, I don’t own many books. Turns out I was wrong; I’ve just filled twelve boxes with books. This doesn’t bode well for the stuff I do think I have a lot of.

Packing is hard work, physically and emotionally, but it doesn’t fit the exclusive and extremely narrow definition that my mind has for “real work”. Packing was about to join housework and self-care on the list of things that I expect to happen without using up any actual time, but I spotted impossible expectations at it again. Just in the nick of time.

The solution? Dancing breaks. I plan to make the most of these last weeks of living alone, performing my solo expressionist dance creations for two unimpressed (if not disturbed) cats, and the occasional driver stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway who glances up at my windows as I go twirling by.

Now that I only have 3 weeks left in this neighborhood I’m feeling equally sentimental about the many ‘must try’ places that are about to be abandoned unexperienced, as I am about my favorites, like Maggie Brown. Especially Sunday brunch on the terrace.

And I’m trying not to order Thai food every single night, knowing that there won’t be Thai in the new hood. How will we survive?

Circa 1982:

I’m the one sporting the pink beard with green boogers coming out of my blue nose.

My cohorts are my brother, my uncle, and my best friend in mischief. I don’t remember us making the masks but I remember the excitement of the new polaroid camera and waiting for the picture to appear.

Thanks to the flashback friday group on flickr for making me dig this out.