January, 2008. Four years ago this month, Tom and I (plus our little cat, Pedro) moved from London to Boston.

We had been married for just under a year. A year defined by endings and good-byes. Our new life hung before us like a blank canvas, waiting to be painted. It was the start of an adventure.

View from the window, January 2008

But I don’t remember feeling like I was on an adventure. When I look back at those first months in Boston, I recall an omnipresent anxiety about getting our lives in place, making decisions, becoming established. I had a peculiar sense of disorientation as I tried to settle into a place that hadn’t been my home for more than eight years. The bewildering familiarity. The foreign sense of sameness. Like trying on old clothes that don’t fit anymore.

I always said that I would never move back to Boston in winter. Yet there we were, arriving in hard, frosted January. The ground was piled with snow and the drifts got deeper with each week’s storms. It was a frigid winter. The cold got into my bones early and left me chilled for the whole season; I never felt warm that first winter no matter how many sweaters and socks I piled on my shivering skin.

We were staying with my brother, who had just bought an old colonial house in the suburbs. A place called Melrose, it was small and neighborly with a little Main Street and not much to do after 8 PM. You needed a car to get anywhere and we didn’t have one. Couldn’t get one until we got jobs. After London, Melrose felt like Mars. The house my brother bought was a “fixer upper” which he would soon make over into a beautiful home.

Our bedroom at my brother's house, January 2008

At that point, in the winter of 2008, it was a crumbling relic. The wallpaper had been stripped and the walls were yet to be painted, the ceilings were cracking, the furnace was on its last legs and the kitchen looked like time had stopped in 1972.

Every day, Tom and I applied for jobs while a parade of painters, contractors and appliance delivery men worked around us.

And then there were my grandparents. My grandfather, unable to breathe without an oxygen tank and painfully underweight, couldn’t get out of bed one day in April. He asked why there was a bird perched on the wall, watching him. We took him to the hospital and that’s where he died, a few days later. My Grandmother, his wife of more than 50 years, didn’t want to live in their house alone. Never the easiest woman, she didn’t want to go anywhere else either. She went through hired homecare workers like tissues, none of them strong enough to last with her.

My Grandmother was lost and scared, but it was hard for any of us to be patient with her. She wanted every member of our small family to be with her at all times, so Tom and I spent many nights and weekends at her house. Tough, draining nights and weekends that defined our first year in Boston, our second year of marriage.

Weeks after my Grandfather died, my Grandmother was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer in her lungs and liver. She succumbed in October, on a hospice bed in the formal living room at their house; the all-white room that no one ever sat in. She was the first person I saw die.  She didn’t seem ready to go.

In the midst of all this, Tom and I got jobs. We bought a car and a house, too. We filled the house with furniture, we painted the walls and landscaped the garden. We were getting our lives in place, but none of my anxiety was easing. The job gave me little satisfaction. I resented the long hours and dreaded the commute from the city to the suburbs. I was convinced there was a ghost in the house. I hated to be there alone. I looked at the paintings on the walls, the flat screen televisions, the vases, the lawn furniture and flower pots and I wished they didn’t belong to me. They pressed on me like a weight that I couldn’t get out from underneath.

A lot happened that year, but none of it felt like it happened to me. It happened around me, I was present, but I wasn’t really in it. Later, Tom and I would talk about some of the decisions we made and neither of us could really remember who made them, or why. Big decisions, like about buying the house. I thought you wanted to buy a house in Melrose. No, I thought you did.

Oh.

We could have got stuck there, at the place where we started four years ago. But we didn’t. Sometimes I’m surprised we made it through. But we did. Looking back, I remind myself that we wouldn’t be where we are today if we didn’t start there.

But I also thank my lucky stars that January, 2008 is far behind us.