We fell into a routine: My husband and Keith would drive together to the Metra station and take the train together downtown and back every day. Alisa drove around a lot for work at that time, and would often get home before the men in the evening giving us a chance to share our day as we put dinner together. I quickly enrolled Jims in a preschool program run by a long-time friend in my old North Park neighborhood, and otherwise kept my little kids entertained, tried to keep Alisa & Keith’s home intact and clean, shopped for food and put dinner together for all of us each night, and of course worked on finding us permanent residence.
Life obviously doesn’t stand still when you’ve been away for years, so even though the Chicagoland area was familiar to me, things changed. I forgot where things were and had no idea how places had evolved. Where to take sick kids to the doctor? How to begin looking into kindergarten? What did housing cost? Where to buy a car? Where to insure a car? Alisa & Keith helped us navigate all of these things and with their generosity, really took the pressure off making quick decisions in favor of making good decisions.
Finally, we settled on Evanston. It is where I grew up, very convenient to the city, right on the lake which would provide lots of entertainment in the summer, and a true city with neighborhoods and a culture—not a suburb with subdivisions and cul-de-sacs. And we decided to rent at first. Evanston was expensive and also we decided that we weren't in a great place to make a commitment as huge as real-estate purchase. Buying our little Ford Focus and committing to 2-year mobile phone plans seemed like big enough steps. In Latvia, you never had to commit to much of anything.
With a city and community settled on, I began making calls and arranging to look at flats. Like Chicago, Evanston has many flats. High and mid-rise apartment buildings of course exist, but brick buildings with very spacious 2-8 unit apartments are even more prevalent, and that’s where I steered our home search. Chicago flats are very comfortable. I’ve lived in several of them: North Sawyer was a 3-flat, flats were my homes with friends in college and after, and of course, my Great Grandma Lucy’s 2-flat meant love and old-Chicago all rolled together. They are solidly built with brick, oak, and wet plaster. They have enormous windows, vestibules, ancient buzzer systems, always a living room and dining room, gorgeous doors, and back porches. They were efficient but elegant, encouraged community and family, and were simply built to last. I learned to appreciate them, and it was settled.
While Jims was in preschool, I would drive up with my little girl, park and stroll her down the streets I grew up on looking for For Rent signs and assessing the buildings and neighborhoods from the outside. It was very cathartic walking these same sidewalks as the mother instead of the toddler in the stroller, or the little girl trying to avoid the cracks, or the preteen with a dollar in her pocket heading to the bakery for a happy face cookie. There was most certainly a full-circle feeling running through me, and as I found myself in front of Mustard’s Last Stand, next to Dyke Stadium and across the street from the colonial office building my father used to work in (top floor, last window on the left), and with the oak trees in bud and daffodils in bloom, something inside of me--louder than a nudge and quieter than a whack on the head--said there's a story in all of this. It was about the size of a whisper, but very clear, that one day, when the time is right and the whole circle closed and everything settled on, I would have a story that I would need to write and that this day would be part of it.
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