Home

Obvious, right?  The first day back, really back (not just climbing 17 flights to feed the fish) in our apartment after almost a week of our nomadic life in the Bronx and upstate.

What should be a tremendous relief--and don't get me wrong, it is--is filled with so much more.  We were, of course, faced with the cleanup of a defrosted refrigerator and toilets I don't even want to talk about.  Messes we just left when we escaped from our dark, non-functioning apartment.  I guess, in hurricanes, as in life, you may be able to run from the messes for a while, but you always end up having to return to clean them up.

For close to a week, we were expected to deal with the ramifications of this event, but in a rather shell-shocked way, with leeway given for slow transportation and with the job of managing our kids' school lives removed.  Now that we are home, there are so many expectations that I am shaking just thinking about them.  I would like to find a newly cleaned and purged refrigerator freeing, but I find myself nervous that it won't contain the foods my children want to eat.  I would like to be happy that my children, who have been rather stir crazy and missing their friends for a week, are going back to the structure of school, but I find myself worried about managing the complicated transportation logistics and homework that come along with getting them educated.  I would like to be thrilled to go back to an easy trip from home to work instead of an odyssey that includes multiple boroughs and 30-40 block walks, but I find myself skittish about going back to my die-hard crosstown bus.

Billy Joel wrote a song (which a friend sang at my wedding) called "You're My Home," in which he talked about home being less about a place and more about the people who are with you, and I'm realizing that perhaps that has been true this last week.  Despite all the craziness, I have been surrounded by my husband and kids, and an extended family of people who helped us get through it all, by refrigerating our food, and giving us beds, and distracting us with great conversation.  So, while it might be nice to sleep in my own bed tonight, perhaps, in a way, I've had a home all week.  Maybe not my own, with the ridiculous numbers of toys and books and plants and stuffed animals, but a home where we could all just be.  Settling back into this one may be a bit harder than I'd imagined.