“It’s only a year! We can do anything for a year!”
Three months into our year in Sydney, these words reverberate in my mind. In hindsight, a year sounded so short. In the grand scheme of our lives, it is nothing, just a blip on the radar. And yet, when the sun rises and sets daily and you wake up 365 times in order to see said year through to completion, I have discovered it doesn’t feel like “nothing”. It still very much feels like we are living. It feels like these days are real and that these memories will be real. And the hard still feels hard and if I am being honest, sometimes a bit unending.
365 days mean a lot of coffee being brewed at home, it means an entire grade for my oldest to learn at home. It means my husband will spend his days acclimating to a new job with a new work environment and culture – from home. It means we will visit our beloved playground hundreds of times – sometimes twice a day. It means at least 1000 meals and snacks and drinks will be prepped and handed out and mostly enjoyed around our table.
What I didn’t realize and couldn’t have known was how easy it would be to feel unsettled and transient. I didn’t know what it would actually feel like to desire to put down roots and yet feel the need to hold back. To feel both at home and homesick. Home in that this is where we are living – this is where our little family calls “home” each day. This apartment with two bedrooms and two bathrooms (which is glorious and by the way might ruin me for the future!) is where the legos and strollers and our clothes are right now. And yet, not home, because it’s not quite ours.
We didn’t pick out the furniture, have a combination washer and dryer (hello, most inefficient appliance ever!), and are using the almost too well-loved frying pans that were here upon arrival. And because we are here for only a year, I have resisted hanging anything on the walls.
When I think of making our home homier, my mind immediately wonders how we will get rid of that particular item at the end of the year – will I sell it on Facebook marketplace, just throw it away (which sounds so wasteful!), pawn it off to a friend we haven’t yet met, or hope that a charity shop will come to take it away?
I’m sure so many people have done this before and I am just a click away from blog after blog after blog of advice. But, not one of those writers could have told me how I would actually feel in the midst of a year that seemed as though it might fly by, and yet now feels as though each day is taking all the time in the world. No other person or writer could have prepared me for what it feels like to have left home and created another home for a short season during a global pandemic with the city locked down.
And yet, a year is 365 days more than nothing. It’s still a real season of our life and memories my kids will have and that we will have for the rest of our lives. And I wonder if it’s actually worth putting something on the walls…because, yes, it’s only a year. And yes, we can make do with anything for a year. But, now that we are here, do we really want to?
Katie Evans 