The devil lives in the still waters

No place is perfect.

Interior (My dining room), Wassily Kandinsky, 1909

I slept in my own bed instead of an air mattress or a sleeping bag for the first time in six weeks.

One thing I didn’t anticipate in my cross-country move is that despite the joy in having three friends visit me back-to-back to help me settle into my new house, I can’t quite think or feel in front of others to the extent I can alone.

It took solitude to really appreciate how much physical, emotional, and mental energy a cross-country move required of me. It took solitude to start to develop a routine, to sign up for a CSA, to arrange for a biweekly sourdough subscription, to start to work out regularly, to learn the quirks of this new physical space and feel myself into it.

I moved around a lot growing up, apartment to apartment, while I romanticized the house that I was born into, the house that I was forced to leave behind, my grandparents’ house. That house had something none of my apartments had: land. Our front yard was filled with peach trees and winding paths among roses and irises and gladiolus, something always in bloom. Behind the house there were hundreds of cherry trees, several plum trees, gooseberry bushes, red and black currants. Hoop houses and potatoes and corn and strawberry fields. The compost was so large that you had to jump into it and turn it with a pitchfork.

I always thought my desire for homeownership came from the pursuit of the elusive American dream I was taught, but it turns out that it actually came from my rural grandparents on the other side of the world.

They’re both dead now, and I’m thirty-three. I was expecting buyer’s remorse to make an appearance by now or maybe regret, more than a month into living in my very first house. Instead, I feel certain about this decision even though it is, and will, certainly impact my career negatively. I feel certain because I feel relaxed in my body. I feel certain because of the way that the people here, friends and strangers, have held and welcomed me.

• My next-door neighbor came over within days of my arrival to introduce himself and give me the scoop about who else lives on our block. I drew a little reference map for myself so I wouldn’t forget people’s names. Across the street, I met an older couple who were so excited to hear I was from New York. They had just been to Brooklyn for the very first time this summer for a large family reunion.

• I dragged myself to the local county elections office to register to vote just a few days before the deadline. I couldn’t register online without Oregon identification. I was anticipating a DMV-like experience, but when I walked in several staff greeted me with smiles and one beckoned me over. She looked over my paperwork to ensure I hadn’t made any mistakes, welcomed me to the state, and told me “thank you for registering to vote,” in the most genuine tone while holding eye contact. I can’t underestimate how few of these kinds of experiences with the government I’ve had in my lifetime.

• The barista at my local coffee shop greets me with an excited “Dizzy!” every time I walk in, even though I’ve only been in a handful of times. She learned my name my second time there, after recognizing a local tattoo artist’s work on my arm.

• In anticipation of the “big one,” I arranged for an earthquake seismic assessment last week. The specialist who came looked around my crawl space and then asked, “where can we sit?” In my dining room, he gave me an in-depth physics lesson, complete with props and math equations about lateral load, to make sure I really understood the risks before I paid anything. I asked a lot of questions, and he spent an entire hour with me.

• I began the extensive project to replace my lawn with a native, drought tolerant, nitrogen-fixing lawn alternative after watching many YouTube videos and spending time on the '“fuck lawns” subreddit. I showed up at the local lawn alternative store walk-up window and was greeted by a woman who patiently walked me through the process, the options, and her recommendations on lawn tools. There were “bird & pollinator habitat” signs at the front desk that I was eyeing, hoping to live up to a sign by next spring.

• The previous owners left wall-mounted lamps in the bedroom, and I put them up on Facebook marketplace. The woman who came to buy them told me she was an interior designer and community organizer. She explained that was getting the lamps for the new Street Roots office. I told her I was also an organizer, and the lamps were on me. She leaned in real close and slipped me a ten dollar bill into my hand, the way your grandma might if she didn’t want your parents to see, and told me to get the fanciest coffee I can get to treat myself. We hugged before she left.

• In my online neighborhood group, someone posted a photo of several concord grape vines overflowing with fruit. She asked if anyone wanted to come pick some because her family couldn’t possibly eat them all. It turns out she lives on my street, just a few houses down. When she learned which house I lived in, she told me she immediately noticed when I had put my Halloween decorations up. I picked an enormous amount of grapes (several pounds, still barely made a dent) while we made a pact to continue to go all out on decorations for every holiday until everyone else on our street did, too.

Now that I write these moments down, they feel so small.

And it’s not like I didn’t have pleasant stranger interactions before, it’s just that I used to have negative ones more frequently. Now I catch myself looking forward to having to go to the pharmacy to pick up my prescriptions or to go to the post office.

Very soon, I let my guard down, let my nervous system slow so much that when a security woman yelled at me at the airport for idling my car while I waited for a friend, I started sobbing. I was a little child again, right there in the driver’s seat of my car, feeling like I was in trouble. I was a New Yorker again, the target of a stranger’s bad day.

No place is perfect. But I’m savoring the moments of kindness and community while it still feels novel to me. The culture shock has made space for a deep gratitude, and I’ll hold on as long as I can.