A year ago this month, I went to look at an apartment. A ground-level unit in a big house, with the landlords living on the second floor, one of their adult children on the third, and two more adult children in the back. It felt a little like a cave, with a very low ceiling, but that was nothing but upside to me: it meant I could reach all the kitchen cabinets.

I packed up the pieces I wanted to keep from an old life that was mercifully over. There were fewer than I expected. A friend helped with my mattress, but most everything else I wrangled on my own-- down the stairs of the house that's since been sold-- or arranged delivery as part of Craigslist deals. I'll take the cast-off bits of your life to go build mine now.

I got Divorce Kittens, a longstanding promise to the kids in the old life unavoidably deferred to the new. My apartment got dubbed "CatCove": originally "CatCave" (for the low ceiling) but somehow a vowel shift happened and stuck.

Kittens walking on a loom

There are looms here and a wall full of yarn, drawers full of thread, shelves packed with fabric. Bookshelves taller than my current ceiling lined the walls of several rooms in the old house; what I brought with me easily fits on a couple small ones. The textured walls are completely inhospitable to sticky hooks, so I've used colorful painters tape to cover the walls with equally colorful posters, photographs, and children's drawings. Above my bed is the menagerie of delightful creatures that friends near and far drew me for my 40th birthday.

Drawings of assorted sea creatures, land creatures, and flying creatures, cut out and taped to the wall

It took a long time, even once I had the cats, for me to want to be here more than I had to, more than just when I had the kids. Even through the summer, it was more of a storage unit and cat-zoo than somewhere that felt like I belonged -- let alone a space where I had control over how things were and what happened. My girlfriend's apartment -- much like the homes of childhood friends and high school teachers-- felt safer. It took me a while to even realize the extent to which "home" has often felt like an unsafe place, somewhere where there are complex sets of rules to follow and other people to placate. Home as a set of demands and expectations and implicit danger in the background to keep you in line.

It's not as if I live without any constraints now: in some sense, there are even more, since this is a much smaller space. The kids don't like the noise of my sewing machine when they're awake, and they have even more cause to dislike it when they're trying to sleep. As a result, I sew a lot less, and work it around their schedules. At the house, I hated to clean, feeling like it was usually left to me to take care of, and I wasn't willing to let it eat all my free time, as I had seen it do to my mother. CatCove is often chaotic, but I don't mind the cleaning, and the kids have gotten used to helping. Cleaning feels different when you're doing it for you, and not to placate capricious powers that be.

I don't quite know when it changed. Maybe it was sometime in the last few weeks, as I've begun a new academic year, trying to juggle schedules and kids and this different life. It's getting harder and harder to remember what it was like to go home to the house; it's all beyond a kind of horizon. It feels like, in some sense, I (as I am now) have simply always lived here. There must have been a time before here, but it happened in some sense to someone else.

I ran into my landlord-neighbor the other day, as I was locking up my bike. Out of the blue, he brought up the same thing -- that it's strange that it's just been a year, that it feels like I've always lived here, and my kids and I fit right in. I've been lucky to land -- with the first apartment I looked at -- in a place with incredibly kind people, who have rescued my cats when they have managed to squeeze through window screens and land, confused, outside. Who text me when I forget to move my car on street cleaning days. Who grab packages for me when I'm not around. Whose quiet footsteps or vacuuming upstairs are a source of comfort: there are other people nearby, my world here is inter-connected with others, I'm not trapped in a house that's someone else's bubble of their own reality and rules.

Home is now a good place, a safe place, a place I'm happy to be, alone or with others. Especially with the horrors of everything going on out in the world, I'm grateful to have gotten to that place -- both this space itself, and in my head.