Sitting tight

[redbird]

There's a meme floating around, look up and post the distance (and driving time--it's a US meme) between your childhood and current homes. I didn't bother looking anything up: I know that my childhood home, meaning the house I lived in from ages 5 to 18, is about an hour and a half from my current home by subway.

When I mentioned to someone at work that I spent New Year's with family in Montreal, they asked whether I'd grown up there.

The oddity, for a New Yorker, isn't that I have family (blood and choice) in three countries: it's that this is true and I was born and raised in this city of immigrants.

Comments

[suecochran.livejournal.com]

My parents sold their home in Brooklyn this past June and moved to lower Manhattan. It was a traumatic move - the getting ready for moving part. They'd owned the house for thirty years, and I spent most of my important coming-of-age years there. It also was my sanctuary many times in recent years. I suffer from bipolar 2, and there were several periods where I would come up to stay with my parents, sometimes for close to a year at a time when I found myself unable to care for myself and my son. There was also a ton of accumulated detritus from the past that had to be tossed - I'd thought I would get to sort through it, but in the end most of it got thrown out, and I'm the better for not having had to go through all of that letting go (I also have OCD and both my parents and myself are hoarders - letting go of things is HUGE).