About

Over five years ago, I wrote the following:

Second story windows give perspective.

I know, because I live in a basement.  The view from its windows is limited.  Several months after college, I moved to Asia to work in a country I had never seen, with people I had never met, in a language I did not know.  To call my perspective “limited” would be quite the understatement.  Awkwardly, I stumbled through eighteen months there, days that were usually messy, beautiful, dull, humbling and heartening at the same time.

And I got a glimpse of life from a different perspective.

It has been several years since I returned.  I have learned that second-story views are usually linked to change, that they require work, and that they are invaluable.  It also seems like these perspectives are much clearer when shared with others.

Now I am getting ready to take another one-way ticket to a country I have never seen, with a language I do not know (at least, not much).   Friends await this time, and I’m moving from a basement apartment in New York to their basement apartment in the Middle East. But I am hoping for a second-story perspective.  Come, check out the view.

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So I moved in 2014 from a basement in New York to a basement in the Middle East.  Eventually I moved to the second-story of that same Middle Eastern house.

Then, in 2017, I moved back to New York– this time with a second-story view of the Hudson River and a brand new husband, whom I had met and gotten engaged to while in the Middle East.

After a year in the USA, we moved together back to the Middle East.  The apartment we live in now is, coincidentally, another basement.  (Technically I guess they call it “garden level”– some parts are underground, and we have some windows at ground level).  But we are finding lots of things that give us new perspective.  I may try to write about some of them…