And, wrapped in a blanket, begins to count and wait

One Sunday back in 2011, a few weeks after making the move to Boston, I was milling around the coffee-and-donuts table following the 10:30 service at the Brighton-Allston Congregational Church. I was chatting with another girl in her early 20s who was also a recent transplant to the city. Like me, she'd wandered into BACC partly for the God stuff, but also in the hopes that the church would be an opportune place to meet people and make new friends. (Reader, it was not. Services there are fine, but only about a dozen people show up on any given Sunday, and most are AARP-adjacent.) We were swapping stories about settling in and getting acquainted with the neighborhood. She admitted to having a hard time with the transition: she was a New Englander by birth, but she hailed from one of those tiny, one-stoplight towns and was feeling pretty intimidated by the Big City.

I don't remember what exact grievances she detailed after that, because I was too busy trying to hide my smug amusement at the idea that someone used the phrase "Big City" to describe Boston. It's a major city, sure: Boston draws tourists and has Tom Brady and Big Papi and generates artists and has a history and reputation that people are aware of. (That reputation can basically be summarized as "Pahk the cahr on Hahvahd Yahd; also Whitey Bulger," but still.) Population-wise, though, Boston is roughly the size of El Paso or Nashville, and by area, it doesn't even make the list of the 150 largest cities in the US. (It's 51st in terms of population density, which is a "meh" statistic if I've ever read one.) I'd just moved from Chicago, and my Second City Superiority Complex was off the charts. In my mind, no real Big City had fewer than a million people. A Big City by virtue of its Bigness had to be a little incoherent, impossible to take in all at once. The fact that you could walk from Franklin Park to Paul Revere's house in a single afternoon, taking in 90% of Boston Sights along the way, was disqualifying.

In addition to making me appear mildly insufferable, that anecdote reveals how large Chicago still loomed in my consciousness in the months after the move. As I wrote in an old post about that period, "Chicago has always been 'my city' -- the only place anyone ever meant when they said they were headed 'downtown.' It was the center of all the weather maps." Everything I encountered in Boston got compared against the Chicago-standard in my mind: I saw the T by way of the L, Fenway by way of Wrigley, Harpoon by way of Goose Island, Menino by way of Daley. When people asked me where I was from, my go-to answer was, "Well, I'm from the Chicago area originally, but I live in Boston now."

By the time GR and I repatriate back to the Midwest later this month, I'll have lived in Boston for seven years. 

My mind always felt sort of divided over the impulse to consider Boston "home," for the simple reason that I knew it wasn't destined to be my home forever. My time in Boston would be limited to however long it took me to finish my degree. I felt especially conscious of this early on, when my heart (in the form of GR) was still in the Central time zone. It's like there was a perpetual asterisk attached to my Bostonian-ness, or an implied "...for now" hovering over the work I put into making a life here. 

But then: I've been here for seven years. At a certain point, the asterisk loses some of its power. The plate tectonics of your internal Sense of Place go ahead and shift anyway.

I know this to be true because, on my last couple trips to Chicago, I found the streets to be ridiculously, unnecessarily wide, albeit delightfully straight. The L is too loud. Friends living there have out-of-whack sensibilities for what constitutes "nearby" or "just a block or two away." Everything feels a little underpriced. The Chicago flag is everywhere. Walking around, I notice how flat the ground is.

Boston has permeated my sense of How Things Should Be. I tune out the weird ghostly whine of the Green Line. I tend to assume buildings are over fifty years old. I don't actively appreciate the fact that it's perfectly safe to walk around my neighborhood in the middle of the night. My ears have stopped hearing Boston accents as freakish anomalies. My equilibrium isn't disturbed by hills. I implicitly depend on the conversation and support of loving friends who I've seen through grad school, relationship changes, personal milestones and tragedies. I take for granted living in my apartment, the one where I surrounded myself with a fortress of library books and wrote my dissertation, where GR and I established our first home as newlyweds.

Home finds you where you're at. Returning to Chicago is a homecoming. Once I get there, I'll be homesick for Boston.

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...That said:

Last Wednesday, during a visit to the Trillium Beer Garden downtown, I noticed a food truck parked nearby. On its side was printed bold lettering that said "SHUCK IT."

I made a comment to GR about how niche food trucks have gotten these days. Here, for example, we have a whole food truck devoted to selling corn on the cob.

He looked at me quizzically before responding, "...Oysters. That truck sells lobster rolls and oysters."

You can take the girl out of Illinois, etc.