Last week I moved into a new apartment here in Lisbon.
When you travel a lot, it can affect your mood and eat away at your clear-thought-process.
But once I settled down, unpacked my bags (which took me several days because I didn’t feel grounded enough — thank you Inês for encouraging me), and I finally got used to the small child who lives upstairs and jumps and runs until midnight, every night, making peace and quiet almost non-existent… after all that, I realized in this apartment, I’ve created a home.
I can create a home anywhere, we all can, if we just slowly lay the bricks.
Photos from outside my apartment window:
This cat. Who stares at me everyday and makes me think of my own cat back home, who I miss so much, it hurts sometimes.
The morning light. It hits just right around 11 a.m., revealing the remnants of chipped paint on the window frames that say, ya, we’ve been here a while.
The fresh laundry. That hangs outside the apartments, reminding me that there is life behind each and every one of those windows, even if I sometimes feel like I’m the only person in the world.
The balcony gardens. Which bloom, even in the wintertime, because the Portuguese really do value nature and work with it – not against it – in a way that I haven’t seen anywhere else.
The latte (Galão). That costs me just .70 cents and is made by the elderly woman who runs a cafe with her husband, not 12 steps from my front door.
On days like this, I don’t miss my $6 lattes, the hustle of Toronto, the obscene honking horns or even the vast number of opportunities that a Canadian passport can afford me. They are not my universe; just small, inconsequential bits of my world, and maybe even yours. But they do not define us. Remember that.
It’s quite incredible the life that can exist just outside a pane of glass and a window frame. But what’s even more fascinating is what can be reflected back to us, if we look closely.
-sandy.
