Separation pains

I'm convinced that moving is the least fun you can have in life. There is always a lot to do, usually involving hard work and great inconvenience. Then add to it the emotion of leaving a home, job, friends, family and location and you have a seriously traumatic event.

Five years ago my wife and I left Brooklyn and bought a house in New Jersey. We loved Brooklyn and only left because we felt priced out of the neighborhood. We'd come to accept New Jersey as our home, but Brooklyn was the place we first lived together, where we spent many of the formative years of our relationship and where we've left a little bit of our hearts.

We went back to see friends we see far too seldom and spent a few hours in our old neighborhood (Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill). Despite the changes that five years have wrought, it felt like coming home. There is something very special and indefinable about this borough of churches. When we moved there our old neighborhood felt like a neighborhood and after 7 years of living there, we felt that we belonged, much more than we do in our very nice town in New Jersey five years later.

It's nice to see that despite the many changes, and improvements over the intervening years, that some of the old family places are still there and some of same characters (and I mean that in a good way) are still standing on the corner, chatting with friends and watching the "new" immigrants to the neighborhood, with a slightly uncomprehending look on their faces. They may not understand or accept these newcomers, but they always seem to find a way to coexist.

It will be soon time for us to get in the car and head south. I do so with no little trepidation, but also with excitment for the future. But wherever I may live, New York will be part of my soul. I was born in New York and raised there and even though I lived for five years in New Jersey, if anyone ever asked me where I was from, I always answered: "New York".

What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not -- distance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walked the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had received identity by my body,
That I was, I knew was of my body—and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body.

Walt Whitman - Crossing Brooklyn Ferry