Photo courtesy of Emily Lodish

Boston has yet to open its arms to me. It’s a place for insiders and people with an innate sense of direction, neither of which I am. They have shockingly few street signs here, and the subway lines are like spokes on a wheel, which funnel people out of the city center but don’t let you go between neighborhoods. How welcoming.

There are cannons fired outside my office on Lewis Wharf with alarming regularity. It’s a constant reminder that I am in a city where history prevails and newcomers are confronted with a sneer. But I have never been one to turn tail when tested, and after much deliberation, there seemed only one logical thing to do: to dig in my heels and begin furiously nesting.

It is a treat for someone like me who, despite being nearly 29, has never really stayed in one place long enough to grow a houseplant. After college, I washed up in New York and bounced around Brooklyn and between boyfriends for roughly three years. I lived in five different neighborhoods and juggled countless part-time jobs, the most memorable of which was wearing underwear on the outside of my clothes and standing in Herald Square asking people if they’d like free panties.

It was the sort of scattered existence that results from not having a plan, and simultaneously prevents you from creating one. A fast-paced limbo. So, after a particularly heinous stint as a temp in a windowless chamber at a corporate law firm, I decided to change my ways.

I took a job as a reporter at a local paper in Cambodia. It was time to invest in one thing, I thought. I just needed to do it somewhere far, far away. Somewhere warm, where people shower outside and a massage costs a buck twenty-five.

Cambodia was for me a time of adventure and of personal growth, the bulk of which was promptly erased when I moved back home to live with my mother last March. For five months of unemployed hell, I spent most of the time in my jammies, picking stickers off my childhood dresser.

I did manage to accomplish four things of which I am proud: witnessing childbirth, getting really good at Scrabble, learning to make mosaics, and finishing a 10-mile race. But aside from that rather haphazard list, I wasn’t making much progress. Certainly not on the job front.

Understandably, I had lost touch with some folks in the US while abroad, and of course there was the small issue of a global economic meltdown. Those really rad stories about traipsing through the jungle in Cambodia weren’t seeming all that rad anymore.

When I finally did find work, though, they started to seem rad again. And the work I had found was here in Boston. So, here I am. Building a life in Boston. A little against my will.

Truth be told, it’s going all right. I have accumulated a surprising number of friends over the age of 60 (I guess it’s a Boston thing), and have recently made with my own bare hands the ultimate symbol of domesticity: a breadbox.

The breadbox was the result of woodworking class, which allowed me to indulge the desire to use my hands outside of my largely cerebral job as an editor. It was an ideal antidote to a day at the desk, as well as a near-perfect encapsulation of my whole attitude right now. You want to fire cannons at me, Boston? Well, I’ve got a power saw.

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