Home is where the laborious craft projects are

This week marked 3 months since we moved to Australia. And what a 3 months. A ton has happened - we started new jobs/degrees, found and mostly furnished an apartment, submitted a shocking number of documents to various governing and regulatory bodies, explored new flora and fauna, tried new foods, etc. And so much of it has been amazing. I feel we are fully emersed in the Melbourne experience. If this journey was just a trip rather than a 3 year change of address, now would be the perfect time to head back home.

For the first time since we got here, I am homesick. Sure, I have had pangs of missing home many times since we got here. But this week I found myself properly homesick. Its kind of strange - I actually recognized the feeling of homesickness pretty early on in the week. I spent the rest of the week trying to figure out how to describe the experience. I'm not sure I've quite figured it out, but I'll try to muddle through.

When I asked Justin about it, he described homesickness as the emotional equivalent of not knowing what to do with your hands. I thought this was pretty apt - you are mostly fitting in, while also simultaneously hyper aware of how you don't fit in, which makes everything just a little bit awkward. For me, my homesickness is more like having dull static play in the background. Its always there, and it doesn't really impact or wreck anything, it just makes everything less enjoyable. There isn't one singular piece of my Canadian life that I'm able to point to and say 'I miss that'. I think its more about the habits & routines. I miss how much our place on Wood Ave felt like home, how we knew how to get to all the places we regularly went without having to look them up, how we had already figured out the best things to order from nearby restaurants. That makes it sound like I'm just missing familiarity, but I think its more about community. I miss having & belong to a community. Its not like these notions of having a home and belonging to a community are new. I'm sure I've talked about them before on here. Specifically the relief in find a place to live that is ours.

Its possible that my experience of homesickness is very tied up in sleep deprivation. I had a pretty late night at the sleep lab this week as I consolidated my head electrode attachment skills. Plus, I'm collaborating on some research things with Canadian paramedics, which means that lately I've had many very very early morning meetings.

The nature of home & community mean they take time to build. Realistically, for only being here 3 months, I think Justin & I are doing a fantastic job on the 'making friends' front. Over the past few weeks I've started to feel like the people I see every day at school actually know me. The conversations are no longer me giving them all kinds of new information about myself, but actual conversations about relevant topics. And our place is starting to feel like home. We attached some cords to one of the walls in our living room and hung a bunch of pictures up with mini-clothes pins. We have slowly been accruing furniture - we have side tables and a book shelf in the living room so everything isn't just sitting on the floor. We found a shoe rack & small wicker drawer set for free on the curb a few weeks ago (oh yea, we are those people). This weekend we picked up some bedside tables. And this week I finished some knitted window dressing for our living room.

Yes, you read that correctly. I have successfully knitted a window treatment. The windows in our place are massive. Legitimately, we have more window real estate than in any place we ever lived in Canada. All of the windows come with shades already installed, so thankfully we don't have to buy curtains or blinds.

Quick aside: can we all just take a moment to appreciate that apartments don't come standard with refrigerators, but do include blinds? I'm going to guess this is because of the strength of the sun. When it was still very warm here, we discovered if a room is getting direct sunlight, you have to put the shade down to keep it habitable. Otherwise it gets very hot. I would be willing to bet the sun is strong enough in the summer that you could get a sunburn through a window.

The standard shades are quite plain, so I decided I wanted to find a way to decorate at least some of the windows. Right outside our living room window there are some very green trees and bushes. Taking inspiration from that, I embarked on the rather time consuming endeavor of knitting leafy vines that hang along the edges and top of the window. Its taken a couple of months, but I have finally finished. While I may add to it in the future, I'm happy with how it turned out. It occurred to me several times while knitting vines that this is not the first time I have engaged in an intensive craft project in a new place. Anyone who visited our house on Wood Ave after our wedding would have seen the wall of hanging paper cranes. It makes me wonder if there is something about the investment of time and physical labour that helps me manifest home. That somehow, once I have invested enough hours in crafting & decorating, the achievement of 'home' will be unlocked. While I don't think this concept is completely correct, its also not really wrong. Everybody invests in making a space their own. My version is just a bit more labour intensive. I would post a picture for you all to see, but its already dark here. Hopefully I will take one this week.

As it seems like the homesickness has mostly subsided, I will leave you all with a lighter story from the week. Yesterday Justin & I headed to Chadstone in search of slippers. As a reminder, Chadstone is apparently the largest mall in the southern hemisphere. We both found slippers at a funky Japanese store called Muji, and then got some lunch. I wanted to check our Uniqlo for some new work pants, and Justin wanted some time to relax before he went to work, so we parted ways. A few hours later, having successfully found pants, I was ready to head home. I should note that Australia has different sizing for women's clothing (because of course they do), so the pants shopping was a bit more involved than usual. That + the sleep deprivation of the week + a very busy, very large mall made for an overwhelming sensory experience. I don't know how many of you know this, but I have pretty much zero sense of direction. I have no intuition for navigation, even to places I have been multiple times before. This is one of the reasons why I generally prefer walking or taking transit over driving - it gives me more time to figure out where I am going. I ended up walking around chadstone for 20 minutes, trying to find my way to where the buses were. My phone GPS wasn't specific enough to help me figure out where I was, so I ended up calling Justin. I told him what store I was in front of, and he looked up a map and helped me navigate out. Its definitely not the first time I have gotten lost in a mall, and it probably won't be the last.