Moving is never easy. Not if you’re moving ten miles from your last spot or a thousand miles, as I have recently.

It’s hard mostly because of all the stuff. As humans, we have a tendency to acquire stuff. We can’t help it. Even the most Spartan among us would at least need a rucksack of gear to get by; I, it seems, need a fully packed moving truck.

Moving is especially hard with kids and dogs and plants and all the other living creatures we have to uproot in order to get from here to there. (I suppose now my here is this place, when not so long ago it was a very distant there.)

With the emotional turmoil and physical exhaustion, every single one of us newly moved-in folks feels like we’ve been run over by a steamroller – your back hurts, your feet hurt, but there’s nowhere to sit because of all the boxes. And you can’t find the tape; you can never find the tape.

In this last move, I felt particularly shattered. It wasn’t until I began to set up my study, unpacking my books and old journals and photos and typewriters, and all the other flotsam and jetsam I’ve collected, that I began to feel at home again. Something about seeing the well-read, well-loved words and the familiar faces peeking out of their frames brought me back to myself. Not suddenly, with a snap, but slowly, like dripping honey or pooling wax.

This new place still doesn’t feel like home, with its confusing street progression and unfamiliar grocery store layout, but I am more at home in it. And if we are at all adventurous in our lives, striving out into the world to look around all we can (and maybe write about it), then we must learn to carry our homes within our hearts, lest we get lost without them.