Notes on Staying Still

I had not been in one place for more than three weeks in four years. Then a winter came that made travel impossible, and I had no choice but to stay. The first week was uncomfortable. I kept checking departures out of habit, the way you check your phone even when you know there is nothing new on it. The second week I started noticing things. The way the light moved across my kitchen floor between nine and eleven in the morning. The sound the pipes made when the heat came on. The particular silence of a Tuesday afternoon. By the fourth week I understood something I had been avoiding for a long time: I had been moving because I believed the answers were elsewhere. They were not elsewhere. They were here, in the kitchen, at ten in the morning, in the long ordinary light.