If I Can Make It There....

...I'll travel with two children under 3 anywhere!

We're going home to the Big Apple tomorrow, and I can hardly contain my anxious excitement. I'm literally buzzing with eagerness to step off that plane and plant my feet on familiar ground. I can already taste the greasy, crispy "slice" from Frank's, the old pizza joint that nourished my palette and comforted my soul on many a colicky night when nerves and frustration made cooking an unbearable chore. I can hear the rolling laughter of two women brought together by marriage swapping tales over sweet Italian pastry. I can smell the bison's musty odor drifting up from the open field as I push my stroller past flowering dogwoods and up concrete stairs crumbling under the weight of more than 100 years of zoo goers. I feel the infectiousness of four small children's glee as they giggle and frolick their way through fields of browning grass and trees ablaze with color. And I already taste the creamy nuttiness of warmth shared between dearest friends over a piping cup of freshly brewed coffee.

I was not born there. I was not raised there. I never even attended school there. And yet, New York feels more like home than any place I've ever lived. It is where I left pieces of my heart one year and four months ago...in the smile of a friend so dear that I think of her as my sister...in the laughter of her children for whom I literally gave a piece of myself...in the mystique of an institution where I found my passion in love and in life...and in all the familiar sidewalks, store fronts, and thresholds where I passed into motherhood.

And while the most precious pieces of my heart, felt in the strong embrace of a friend and lover and the sweet tug of small hands eager to snuggle and play, are carried with me wherever I go, I cannot deny that a part of me was left behind. A part that keeps me from fully embracing my new home.

Time to revisit the past, collect up old memories, and bring them back to this new place...in the hopes that it too will someday be, "home."

Oh, and along the way I'll be toting blankies, Cinderella, Eeyore, Thomas the Tank Engine, Curious George, and a whole host of other itmes deemed necessary for survival in the eyes of my dear babes. I love them, but man do they need to learn how to pack a LOT lighter!

"Tawk" to ya's soon.