We moved two-and-a-half years ago, and only now does our house seem to feel worn in as a house should — both with memories and simply day-to-day use. While I’m a huge fan of tradition — like camping on the same lake every summer — this holiday I had an incredible need to mix it up, do something different. There’s three of us now when there were once four.

We left, just for a night, with a single cat feeding required, and didn’t even go far — a little more east in Vermont where there was even less snow. I was looking for a break from work and school, for talking together in the same darkened room before sleeping, for exploring a different place with no looming deadline of time.

Interestingly, the unexpected part was the pleasure in returning home, to our warm house and our cats and the patterns we’d left behind. That, perhaps, was worth the trip alone.

… writing is a way of making sense of the world, a way of processing — of possessing — thought and emotion, a way of making something worthwhile out of pain.

— Emilie Pine, Notes to Self