Making a home away from home

Welcome to our little home on the Hill.

This is where we're staying during our sabbatical/leave in DC, on a quiet street in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. We are renting this pied-à-terre (a.k.a. garden apartment  a.k.a. basement apartment) in a rowhouse,.

We found it on SabbaticalHomes.com which is kind of like airbnb but for longer-term rentals like faculty on sabbatical: all the furniture, bedding, and kitchen stuff are included, as are the utilities. The landlords are a family that owns the building; they live upstairs. It's cozy, with large windows that let in lots of natural light.

This apartment is our home here. I love travel, and the kind I especially enjoy is the kind of travel where you have a place to put your toothbrush. Like when I taught at TASIS England for two summers back in the mid 80s: I lived on the campus of a boarding school, in a little cottage.

Or when Bruce and I rented a flat for the week we spent in London with the boys in 2006: we were able to take the boys out during the day to see sights like The Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, and then come "home" for a cozy dinner of soup and toasted cheese and a quiet evening reviewing our day.

Some of the first things I did here in DC were to make this place truly our home. Of course I unpacked everything and found places for the important things: laptop on the dining table (across from where I sit to eat), crosswords on the dresser by the bed, knitting under the end table by the couch.

Little by little, I'm making this apartment our home: while we listened to the State of the Union address (a hazard of Bruce's profession) the first night I was here, I crocheted two coasters for us to use at our little dining table. The next day, I rearranged the kitchen (why are there champagne flutes on this shelf? Let's put plain old wine glasses in their place) and threw out some mismatched plastic containers. Yesterday, I bought some cut daffodils at Trader Joe's for the table. We have only eaten out once--we've been cooking our meals here, in the tiny galley kitchen.

Oh dear. I've bored you, dear reader. You were hoping I'd be sharing tales of the amazing things I'm doing in DC--all the cool museums I've visited and famous politicians I've seen. Sorry. This blog will share some of that later, maybe.

Here's a photo of the Capitol building, visible from the street just a few blocks over from our apartment, to tide you over.

But maybe you will understand: a cozy home can be a great base from which to have adventures, a place to rest and regroup, to reflect on what we're doing, to write, to read. Venturing out is more exciting when there's someplace to come back to--someplace that's not just a warehouses for travelers, but a home for residents. We're not here as tourists for four months: we're living in DC--in our little DC home.