Coming home to the Granite State...

My apartment in Cambridge is bare. Well, my half of it is, anyway. There are boxes and boxes of books, knick-knacks, art work, souvenirs and the collected detritus of my past 24 years of life. When you see that your whole world can fit comfortably into a small, 12-dollar-a-month storage unit. you can't help but feel a little depressed.

I'm moving out of the city this weekend, packing up my junk and heading north to a small town in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire. Eight years after I left my tiny home state for college, I'm returning for the foreseeable future. Since then, I've lived in three of the world's greatest cities (London, New York and Boston) as well as a reasonably decent college town in upstate New York (Ithaca).

I think, at one point, I swore I'd never, ever move back to New Hampshire. Now that my stuff is all packed away, it's sort of hit me that I'm a city boy no more.

There are a bunch of reasons behind the move. I've never had a place of my own, so I figure as my quarter-century birthday approaches, it's about high time.

Of course, being a freelance (penniless) writer doesn't really lend itself to spacious one-bedrooms in urban areas, unless you count the handicapped-sized port-o-johns they set up at high rise construction sites. My economic needs forced me to look outside of Boston for a place to live.

Also, since I really do intend to make this whole writing thing work out, I needed a place free of distractions. Well, I got it. The town I'm moving to has a thriving downtown of one cafe, one convenience store, one pub, one dirty Chinese place and one crazy townie that wears a one-piece Carhart suit and an orange vest everywhere he goes. Whereas, the town I'm moving out of is widely considered to be the cultural hub on Boston, is home to two world-class universities, contains plenty of shopping, hundreds of restaurants, dozens of bars, a half-dozen T stops and one really gorgeous area to run.

I'm also moving for love. My girlfriend has been driving her Jeep Wrangler (in all its eight-miles-per-gallon glory) to Boston on a weekly basis for two years now. She has gotten lost on the Mass Pike (which is actually about 20 miles west of the city), she's been stuck in hours of traffic before, during and after Sox games, she's been involved in a highway car crash, she's had to reverse direction on Storrow Drive hundreds of times, she's learned how to parallel park and she's fallen asleep at the wheel going in both directions. She hates that drive more than I hate Yankee fans named "Sal."

Has she ever complained about it? Well, no, not too much (Only when I forgot to reminder her about that night's Sox game, which causes the 75 minute drive to escalate into the 150 minute range. That only happened a half dozen times or so. Last season.). Did she ever ask me to move? No. Unless you count the way her eyes flashed with the clear, though subtle message that I would be receiving a prostate examination with a 9-iron and a hacksaw if I signed another lease.

But I wouldn't do that to her. Nope, it's time for Mike to pack up and head to New Hampshire.

I have a lot of good things going for me. I have a tremendous apartment (I'll write more on that later) that's a 1-bedroom, practically brand new and I'm getting for only slightly more than what I paid in groceries and cable each month in Boston. I'm near New Hampshire's cultural center of Portsmouth (which, actually, does have culture that doesn't involve Nascar, bass fishing, ice fishing or the ever-popular lit-dynamite-in-a-barrel fishing). And I'm just over an hour from Boston, making the commute down there pretty smooth, since I'll have to be there about three days a week or so until May.

Life's looking up.

Yes, it's sad to be leaving Boston. I've had a great two-year run. Though moving can bring on some brief twinges of nostalgia, it's also an exciting time. It's a new chapter in my life and I'm looking forward to what I've got in store. It'll give me plenty of material for this old blog thing, too, so I'll keep you updated. Wish me luck...

PLUS I get to redecorate! Which I'm totally pumped about. More on that later, too...

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It would be remiss to end this without giving a huge thank you to my incredible girlfriend who, singlehandedly, packed my entire apartment yesterday while I sat and typed up a story that was on deadline. How did I ever get to be so lucky?

Guys out there, that is love. She did that for me just because I needed the help and she cared enough about me to pitch in.

Either that, or she took the opportunity to throw out my Mr. Rogers sweater (this is probably the closest thing to it, just add argyle and subtract the beard) that I like so much and she despises. I'll find out when I unpack...