Happy Friday, my friends! I’d like to celebrate the impending weekend with some end-of-fall photos—a perfect segue into winter, I guess, as we Chicagoans celebrated our first snowflakes of the season yesterday.

But the story behind these photos, I think, is even nicer than the results themselves. A few weeks back, I met up with the extremely talented Jacqui of Happy Jack Eats; we wanted to capture Morton Arboretum, in all its autumnal glory, on film. I took the train out to meet her, through new-to-me villages with sweet storefronts, and ended up having a blast. (I sincerely believe that the best part of moving to a new place has to do with the new relationships that follow. Between meeting lovely people like Jacqui and Maggie in person, hanging out with my hilarious coworkers, and reconnecting with high school and college friends, my heart has been quite full lately. So has my social calendar, but that’s something I can learn to live with.) We talked about photography and our futures, got ourselves just a little bit lost, ran into a troupe of zombie-actors, and had an extremely satisfying meal at Honey Cafe. Basically, there was no room for improvement.

So enjoy these snapshots (Portra 400 for the win!), then call up a friend. You know, just to chat. They make the transition from autumn into winter just a little bit less bittersweet.

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It feels good to have my own space again. My belongings are finally unpacked (well, most of them, anyway) and put away in closets, cabinets and atop shelves—a sure sign of permanence in a housing situation.

There’s a supreme comfort in having your possessions accessible to you, isn’t there? As soon as I unpacked my cookbooks, which had remained sealed in storage since Virginia, I couldn’t stop tearing them from the bookshelves and rifling through their photos and recipes. I was ravenous not for the food, but for the return of a sense of ownership. Even if I wasn’t planning on making anything—and for awhile, the fridge and pantry were too barren to raid—it was still nice to know that Ina Garten’s Tuscan Lemon Chicken was there, just in case my eyes (or my soul) got hungry.

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Moving day came and went—our fourth move in two and a half years!—and now we’re steadily building our nest together, twig by twig, in Chicago’s lakeside Edgewater neighborhood. We still look around slack-jawed on a daily basis, unable to believe that all this high-ceilinged glory is ours. We don’t have nearly enough stuff to fill up the myriad closets and cabinets (three cheers for storage space!) and highly doubt that we ever will, given our minimalist tendencies. And while half of our belongings have yet to be unpacked, and the walls need a fresh coat of paint—Benjamin Moore’s Moonshine, if you were wondering—we already feel quite at home.

Want to take a look around?

I’ll lead you around from front to back. Above is our little dining nook, with its big south-facing windows.

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I’ve started writing a lot about home, an intention that I shared with you in February. But since I haven’t fully explained why I think these discussions are so important, or even exactly what I mean by home, I’d like to do that here today. Hold onto your seats!

Here’s the best definition of home that I can offer you: home is the place you always come back to. In a literal sense, it can be a physical place, defined by the boundary of your abode’s four walls, or a set of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates you can pin down on a map. In an emotional sense, home is the place you come back to for comfort at the end of a long day (and who you are after your public or professional persona has been turned off). More broadly, it encompasses everything from the relationships you share with your partner, family, pets, and roommates to the community that surrounds you. In some cases, home might be a constant, something you could set your watch to—in others, it might be a fluid thing defined by some aspects more than others (like, say, your relationships, more so than place). So when I talk about “home,” I mean different things in different instances: your living space, your values, your people. It’s your personal sphere of influence, whatever that looks like.

As young adults graduating into the world, we don’t exactly lose our old homes, but we are expected to create new ones for ourselves—a heady task that probably requires more guidance than we’re given by our parents, educators, and society. I’m no expert on this matter, but that’s the point—none of us are. We’re leaving a previous life of structure for an undefined new existence. We make our way as best we can, and glean knowledge from our mistakes and experiences.

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A few weeks ago, a storm blew through the North Shore—the kind of storm that makes you feel unsafe to be driving, because of all the hundred-year-old trees that have started falling into the road. Our house lost power, as it is wont to do whenever the wind starts whipping. As the sun inched westward, its internal temperature climbed inevitably toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

As a child of divorce, I will say that this was pretty much the first time that I was thankful to have two houses (although the double Christmas thing hadn’t been too awful). My father had recently moved to a new city; since his electricity remained uncompromised and the renters hadn’t quite taken over yet, we decided to move in temporarily. It was Ted and Koko and I, an air mattress, and my laptop paired with one perfect DVD—Ever After, obviously. Also, a bottle of bourbon. We camped out in the living room, right by the only window air conditioning unit that was left.

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As we roll through July, and the office empties out with coworkers gone fishin’, I’ve been forced to come to terms with a certain unfortunate fact: I’m not going on vacation this year.

Since I’m only three months into work with my new employer, I haven’t been gifted with any days off yet (I’ll have to wait for the six- and twelve-month marks till that happens—and what glorious days those will be!). It could be a whole lot worse, since I’ll end up with eighteen days of paid leave once the year is through—um, yes please? But as Tom Petty so eloquently put it: “The waiting is the hardest part.”

Weekend trips are out, too, as I recently passed my beloved old Bridget Honda on to a new owner. Again, no complaints: I’m elated that $4.50/gallon gasoline, car insurance premiums, and repair bills aren’t draining my bank account any longer. It means, however, that I won’t be leaving Chicagoland for a very long time, as enchanting a land as it may be.

When you have no time, no transportation, and no resources, you dream. So allow me to fantasize a bit about future vacation days, will you?

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I haven’t seen Failure to Launch, but I’m going to hazard a guess about how the film portrays Matthew McConaughey, whose character is thirtysomething and still living with his parents. He’s probably unambitious, career-wise and otherwise. He’s probably not interested in carrying on a long-term relationship, or taking care of anything that requires caretaking. He probably plays a lot of video games—am I on the right track?

The fact is, there’s a lot of cultural baggage that comes with moving back in with your parents. (That movie I was just talking about? Look at its title: failure is the first word. Failure!) So when I moved back in with my mom two months ago—and brought Ted with me!—I was trying to resist ascribing the adjective to our own situation. We’ve successfully held full-time jobs and become financially independent, but we still needed a temporary safety net after moving cross-country. So I stepped back through the doors of my old house, and tried not to wince while doing it.

But you know what? Even though I can’t wait till we get our own place in the city, it’s been really nice here. And I’m not ashamed to admit that.

My mom buys fresh flowers every week to brighten up our white kitchen table. She has coached both Ted and myself through job-search woes and general transition-related malaise, and celebrated my job-search victory as if it were her own. She has oh-so-graciously let Koko into her home, despite a lifelong fear of cats. When she sensed that I couldn’t afford to celebrate Ted’s birthday during my spell of unemployment, she treated us to a day out in the city so we could feast on iconic Chicago foods: Ann Sather cinnamon rolls, Polish sausages, slices of fruit pie from Hoosier Mama, and pierogi and cabbage soup in the Ukranian Village. At home, she makes a roast chicken every week for all of us to feast on. And she tells everyone she knows how excited she is that we’re here.

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There’s a lot that changes when you move from one part of the country to another: geographical features, regional chain stores, and your neighbors’ accents (though we haven’t run into any of Bill Swerski’s Superfans quite yet). One thing I didn’t expect to change so drastically? The contents of the grocery stores.

Recently, over tea and Girl Scout cookies with a friend, I mentioned that I had been surprised to learn—at age eighteen—that Jews make up less than 2% of the U.S. population. Growing up next to Skokie, Illinois, which held the highest percentage of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel, I always assumed that at least half of America was Jewish. The same proportion of my middle-school classmates had thrown bar or bat mitzvahs, after all. He just laughed at me, but after stepping foot in the Skokie Jewel-Osco last weekend, it was obvious why I’d made that assumption. Huge posters hung from the ceiling near the entrance, wishing shoppers a happy Passover. An entire corner of the store had been set aside for Passover foods, and a permanent section held a kosher deli, bakery and dairy case. Growing up on the North Shore, it seemed as normal to anticipate Chanukah as it was Christmas.

It was a far cry from the grocery stores in the D.C. suburbs, which catered to a Salvadorean population; there was no type of dried chile you couldn’t find there. And there was no short supply of neighborhood Vietnamese markets, either. (On a related note, here’s a little public service announcement: if you’re into pho and you’ve never been to the Eden Center, you haven’t lived.)

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As I began my senior year of college—you know, when the only thought on anybody’s mind is “What’s next?”—I thought I had it all figured out. I’d be swooping myself right back to Chicago as soon as I removed my cap and gown, and that seemed to be that. I told my friends and roommates on every occasion that that the subject came up.

But somewhere between first and second semester, seeds of doubt were planted in my mind. I started tuning my ear to a weird internal dialogue that stemmed from a combination of outside influences and my own strange insecurities: “Isn’t the East Coast more cosmopolitan than the Midwest?” “Am I boring for wanting to return to the place where I was born?” Both statements look ridiculous on paper, of course, but can be strangely powerful when played over and over in the ear of a confused young adult. I may not have loved D.C. after spending four years in the place, but it was easy to second-guess myself, especially since most of my classmates were making post-graduate plans in Washington.

So when I met this cute guy and began falling in love, I convinced myself that Washington would be an okay place to hang tight, for a little while at least. If nothing else, it was neutral ground. And maybe the city with imprint me with its intrinsic D.C.-ness, thus bestowing upon me all those traits I had thought were lacking in myself—somehow, I’d become cosmopolitan, important, and powerful. Interesting. Worthy.

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In my last post, when I asked you about a time when your home was in control of you, you responded with a wealth of different answers. Dana talked about the breakdown and renovation of her new house, and Stephanie, Shanna, and Jacqui talked about the stress of homes invaded by clutter (whether good clutter, like wedding gifts, or bad clutter, as seen in Hoarders…eek). Both of which are very different from my unfortunate, pest-related experience of home invasion, but it was clear to me that there was a thread tying all those experiences together: when we are forced to take care of our homes, rather than our homes taking care of us, some crucial balance is thrown off.

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