Moving

Kim and I have been looking for a new apartment for quite some time. The place we’re currently in in Boston’s Leather District has a great kitchen and a nice open feel, but the windows are so drafty they might as well just be open, and the traffic outside… let’s just say I have absolutely had it with Bostonians’ habit of just leaning on their goddamn horns at all hours of the day and night.

It is always surprising to me just how exhausting this process is of looking for the right place to live. There are a ton of reasons we will now reject a place — bad windows, noisy street, wrong light — and yet the next thing that pops up on Zillow always looks like THE PERFECT APARTMENT OMG. I find I get emotionally invested in the thing we haven’t seen yet, and then I am inevitably disappointed when it doesn’t turn out to be great.

In the end, we settled on a place we saw early on in this process but held off on at the time: a Giant Apartment Building with tons of Amenities, which is also much farther from the nearest busy road and has windows so tight you could install them on an airplane. We expect great things from the move — in particular Kim, who works from home, is looking forward to a better variety of working spaces and options for walking around in the daytime. The building is at the edge of the South End which is also a lovely area with tons of restaurants and so on.

What’s interesting about this though is that it underscores how much less rooted we have become since we left Philadelphia in 2015. We lived in the same house in Philadelphia for 19 years and never even thought of moving — we loved our house, our neighborhood, and the friends we made there. Now that we’re away from that, though, it’s much easier to consider just moving every couple of years as the fancy strikes us. I confess I like the freedom that comes with not owning the house I live in, even though that comes at a cost (in the US at least).

Of course now we have to move… sigh…