So What that it Was Seven Degrees Today?

My coat arrived yesterday! My mother shipped my very expensive, very warm winter coat from Canada, and it finally arrived! I have been looking forward this for weeks. Not because I really need it (it’s above zero everyday right now, suckers) but because I have wanted the package itself. This signal from abroad, this concrete evidence of people and places that all too often seem like a dream. Proof. Proof that I am from somewhere. Proof that have roots. It is a strange feeling when you need corroboration that you are who you are, but it was all starting to seem unreal...

As I run to my apartment with the box I cannot stop smiling. The elevator ride to the twelfth floor feels like an eternity. I have never been so excited to see the contents of a package of my own belongings.

I open the box, and extract the full-length coat from it’s month-long confinement. Immediately, I know what I want to do, and I bury my face in the lining and inhale. It smells of all things clean, and calm and comforting. Like that world a thousand of miles away that sometimes I have believing is real. But here it is--verification. A thousand memories flood over my mind and settle in to tranquillize my nerve endings--I picture my mother’s front hall, where the coats are stored. I can picture my mother, my brother and sisters, the comfort of family. I can half-believe that if I lift my head and open my eyes, I’ll smell the cooking from the kitchen, hear the noise of my siblings teasing, see the busy energy that always settles in when my big family gets together. I believe it, and for a very gratifying, nourishing moment, it is true.

It feels like I’ve been in a sauna, like I’ve had three drinks, like I’m lying, once again, in my mothers bed with a cup of tea and my favourite company. I am sedated. And in a city where I am finally starting to feel at home, I remember my first, my favourite home.

That's not to say I've been unhappy here--not at all. In fact, for the first time in a long time I’ve been feeling some peace. Looks like I just needed 15million pushy people smoking, and drinking, and bustling around everyday to calm me down.

But nothing, nothing has felt so great, lately, as this sign of life from accross the ocean.

Yesterday was a very good day.

PS: Mashka and Koshka say thanks for the fantastic box.