West Coast Girl Goes East
It wasn’t clear how I’d find my way back to My Kitchen My Table. So much time has passed since Marci’s Coffee Cake. It’s kind of embarrassing actually. Since the coffee cake the MKMT cookbook club has gone on hiatus and this West Coast Girl has moved East. To New York… Manhattan to be precise. It’s always been a dream of mine to live here so when the opportunity presented itself I said, yes please.
But how to pick up from the coffee cake. Almost every single day for the past 86 days that I’ve lived here something has happened to make me think “I need to write about this”.
There has been an earthquake, a hurricane, the 10 year anniversary of 9-11, and the occupiers have taken up residence in a park blocks from my apartment. I’ve had to re-learn how to do all of the things that I took for granted on the west coast – grocery shopping, finding a good cup of coffee, finding a good baguette, figuring out the best way to get off this asphalt island in a rental car – the list goes on.
I’ve learned that it’s true what they say about New York being a completely different place to live than it is to visit. It is also true when they say that this is the easiest place to live at the same time the most difficult. New York is also, quite decidedly, the most and least convenient. These unique-to-New-York lifestyle contradictions result in the cliché love hate relationship with the big apple which is turning out to be a big bite to chew for this west coaster – good thing it’s apple season!
So getting back to how I found my way back. It happened last week. I stepped on it. For weeks I had been walking up a wooden ramp that merged street with sidewalk. It was simply a piece of ply-wood connecting the two, nothing to think twice about… until last week. Someone had written “Become Your Dream” on the ply-wood. It made me smile, I was inspired. And in that moment I realized I had found my way back.
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