We’ve only been in this house for a few days and already I feel at home here. The house feels familiar, comfortable, right. I guess that means we bought the right house.
At the same time I feel like I’m on vacation. I’ve never lived in a house before, and I associate houses (and especially gardens) with the long summers of my childhood, at my grandmother’s summer house. The noises in the neighbourhood – dogs barking, children playing, chainsaws roaring – also remind me of those times. I have this vague feeling that soon it will be autumn and I will have to go back to the city and back to school.
The comfortable feeling is partly because I am taking the move from a two-room apartment to a 4-room house in small steps, easing myself into this new place. We’re only occupying the ground floor now – the stairs to the first floor are blocked off because we don’t want Ingrid climbing them before we get a banister in place. And while I love the feeling of a garden around the house, I have been enjoying it from a slight distance: from the kitchen window or the veranda. Actually walking or sitting in the garden feels weird. It doesn’t feel like mine yet.
It took a bit longer for Ingrid to be comfortable with the move. She didn’t like the move itself at all: strange place, strange people, strange doings, and nobody was paying much attention to her. The disruption led to a few days of clinginess and a few nights of broken sleep. But I think she’s also more or less settled in here now. She calls the house “home” already, and comfortably finds her way around, even early in the morning when she wakes up and comes searching for me in the bathroom and the kitchen.