A year ago today I was enduring my first Saturday alone in a new state, far away from everyone I knew and loved. I’d never anticipated how physical the pain of loneliness could be, and how it could last and last. Even though I’m no longer alone in this state, and even though I’ve grown accustomed to keeping in touch with my family from a distance, every once in a while and without warning I grieve for what I once had.

I miss sitting in the same room with my parents and siblings, content in their proximity even when there was nothing to say. I miss watching my little brother play endless hours of computer games. I miss my family dog. Somehow, in the midst of my new life, I’m intensely lonely some days, and nothing anyone does or says seems to help.

Luckily, these days are relatively few and far between, and I’ve lived through enough of them that I know they’ll pass.

Irrationally, on these days I miss living in a big city, even though prior to this I’d lived for 6 years in a wanna-be rural-like suburb of a city. I remember moving there and staring in wonder and awe at the corn fields that were less than a quarter mile from our new house. I was suddenly confronted with the realization that even though my girlhood fantasy of living on a farm, riding horses, and wearing long dresses and bonnets every day and been deep-rooted and remarkably consistent (as far as girlhood fantasies go), this was not actually the life for me. I was a city girl at heart, no matter how unromantic that was.

I would never live a life pitted against nature, struggling between taming the land and starving. I would never nurse dying horses back to health. I would never farm the land while battling pneumonia so that I could feed my 10 or 12 children.

No, I realized that years of living in Boston and Chicago (even if I had been born in small-town South Dakota) had conditioned me to expect and thrive on little things that foster human interaction, like sidewalks. Seriously, if you’ve never lived in a sidewalk-free town, you may be taking these fine pieces of construction for granted. Take it from me: lack of sidewalks changes the energy of the entire city.

Well, I thought I’d lived in a small town. I’d experienced life without sidewalks. I’d walked to nearby cornfields. I’d experienced life with fewer than 25,000 people. And then I moved to small-town Minnesota… Ironically, there’s more activity in this city than in the sidewalk-less suburb I moved from. There are even sidewalks here, though they appear and disappear on the sides of streets without rhyme or reason, even in the middle of blocks. And I’m “only” 45 minutes from a major city. But I hate driving, and in my brain a trip of 50 miles is a journey rather than a jaunt. I have to plan such journeys and combine multiple errands to justify them, so I don’t just hop up to the city on a whim.

Still, it’s not all bad. I’ve met some truly wonderful people, and I’ve completed a full year in the job that has become my dream job. I guess I’m just slow at adapting to major life changes.