It’s hard to point to the exact moment when a place loses its strangeness and becomes home, when you can walk into the doorway of a previously unfamiliar room or apartment and feel like you know it: all the switches and plug points and creaky windows, the sound of concealed water pipes and the idiosyncracies of appliances, the smell of the upholstery and the texture of the walls. Or take the streets, where you go from being someone who pauses uncertainly at the pedestrian signal and watch what the others do, to confidently tapping the contraption on the pole like you’d done it since kindergarten. Or the café at the corner where you need to ask, in slow and halting foreign-speak, for the simplest beverage and a pastry whose ingredients are written into its name, but come to putting a couple of coins on the counter and picking up your café crema and walnut br ötchen. ... It’s a beautiful winter morning, crisp and blue, the kind that invigorates and makes me feel like it’s a ...
making sense of the everyday