"we're out of town!"

That's what my daughter said as our plane landed in Salt Lake City almost two weeks ago. And she was right.

Taking off from LaGuardia I hoped to have at least a glance of the city below. The weeks before filled with packing and the like left hardly any time to say goodbye to my sweet residential village, much less the cosmopolitain city just a few miles South. At first I thought that I was sitting on the wrong side but as we took off, the plane curved around and suddenly the city appeared like a map laid out with little pop-up buildings sprouting from midtown and the financial district. Central Park was the perfect rectangle below me and as we flew away, the island of Manhattan getting smaller and smaller, I must admit, I cried.

It's true, there are a lot of things about New York I wasn't overly fond of, and had we stayed that wouldn't have changed. But there is something about leaving a chapter in your life that is a little sad. Farewell to favorite parks, favorite trees, favorite little roads to drive on. We landed in SLC after a relatively uneventful flight (and with four small children, that's saying something) and that part of our lives was over. Almost like we had never been away, and had never lived in New York.

Except for the fact that when I went to Costo it was huge and populated with an unexciting percentage of peoples and ethnicities of little variance, all of whom seemed to like to dress the same. And my kids spent an entire day just running around a vast space called a backyard. I don't have to pay for parking. And when I look out at the expansive horizon, it is incredibly expansive, and not cut off by a multitude of trees and buildings so close together there isn't anywhere to look out, just up. This isn't list of good and bad, pros and cons; it's just a list of some things that are different. And so, if I experience a little twinge when I go to pay for groceries, but don't have to pull out my Stop n' Shop card for the discounts, it's not because I am no longer required to pay $1.40 for a can of refried beans.

It's good to be here. But like reading the last chapters of a book you have completely loved, I can't help but want to go back and flip through a few of the pages once more.