Settling in
If you’ve moved house/job/city even once, you know how painfully long it takes for things to start feeling familiar and comfortable. There are of course the big things: new colleagues and neighbours, fresh bureaucratic nightmares, DMV lines, the deeply depressing yellow strips of paper that are stuck on all your incoming mail for months, reminding you of the unfamiliarity of your new place. Having lived in five states since 2001, I have some idea of this unsettled feeling.
All that eventually, if painfully, sorts itself out, even though you are greyer, more prone to drink, and beside yourself with anxiety at the very sight of a moving truck. However, it’s not until some other small things fall into place that you really begin to settle in: finding a hairdresser you don’t want to stab with the nearest shears handy after looking in the mirror, a yarn store that you actually want to browse in and isn’t a pain to get to, and a cafe in your neighbourhood that you can make your own familiar hangout.
Can you imagine the smile on my face? The coffee isn’t great, but I’m not much of a coffee drinker. The salads are excellent, the sofas inviting and the music unobtrusive and the artwork unpretentious. One of the guys who works there (not the one you can see in the picture) is a bit dyspeptic, but I’ll take dyspeptic anyday over excessively chirpy.
Then there’s the yarn store that is technically in another town, but a short bus ride or brisk walk away. So far at least, the folks there have not set my teeth on edge, and I’ve bought stuff from them several times. As you can see, even my socks like hanging out there!
Miraculously, after two initial disasters, I also found someone who can cut my hair without my having to wear my cabled hat for the next few weeks while it grows back. Right around the block from where I live, too!
So I kicked back today, knit and read a bit in the cafe on a bright sunny day, wandered by the store in my flipflops and bought some needles, and came back and finished my Tiger socks (Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock toe up in stockinette on size 0s, shortrow heels and toes, 60 stitches). A sunday well spent.
Of course, there was that 4.4 point earthquake some days ago that reminded me, a little aggressively, that I’m in northern California, but I am ignoring it; apparently one soon becomes blase enough to call out the numbers on the Richter scale.
I don’t know if I’m going to get that settled in, but well, we shall see.
