Edit 28: Roots and Reach
There are two cities that feel like home to me: one raised me, the other reshaped me.
New Orleans gave me rhythm before I knew I had any. It taught me how to gather around a table and not rush away. It offered beignets and café au lait, king cake passed across a crowded school lunch table, red beans that simmer for hours—because good things take time. It was second lines and Saints games and stories that grew richer with each retelling. It was brass bands and culture you don’t observe but step inside.
New Orleans lives in my bones. I write about her easily because she formed my appetite—for beauty, for story, for community.
But Tokyo did something different.
We lived there twice.
The first time from 2009 to 2011. Jackson was two. Madeline was ten. We were young parents in a city that felt impossibly large and impossibly ordered all at once. We learned train lines while pushing a stroller. We built friendships that crossed language and culture. We experienced the Sendai earthquake together inside a place that could have felt foreign but didn’t. That season bonded us to Tokyo in a way that still feels sacred.
When we left, it felt unfinished.
So in 2017, we went back.
Jackson was ten then. Madeline was eighteen—preparing for college, on the edge of her own leaving. There was something poetic about returning to the same city with children who had grown into entirely different versions of themselves. Jackson even had his sister’s former soccer coach as his fifth-grade teacher—a reminder that the place we once tiptoed into had quietly become part of our story.
Tokyo was no longer just an adventure. It was a thread woven through several chapters of our lives.
We had favorite places. Favorite rhythms. Circles of friends that overlapped and grew—school parents, neighbors, colleagues, late-night dinner and travel companions—and many of those friendships still span oceans and time zones today.
There was MeatMan, our tiny yakitori spot in Roppongi, where smoke curled up from the grill and Shannon was greeted like a local celebrity every time we walked in. Jackson spent his middle school years at ASIJ. Madeleine navigated college while traveling back and forth between Japan and the United States during COVID—something only possible because we were still residents.
My mornings sometimes began at our neighborhood coffee spot, Nem, where a small group of friends quietly guarded our favorite tables and I ordered the maple-cinnamon latte every time. There were the perfectly simple egg salad sandos from 7-Eleven that somehow tasted better than they had any right to. And afternoon teas were taken at every single hotel (more than once). I’d go alone, with friends, or with my forever favorite tea companion, Madeline.
Over time, in the same way we let Tokyo into our lives, the city and the people let us into theirs.
There were late nights in tucked-away cocktail bars, narrow staircases leading to karaoke rooms glowing softly above the street, and restaurants hidden in plain sight that most expats never quite discovered. Over time, we were lucky enough to be invited into some of those places—to have the quiet “in” that comes only after you’ve stayed long enough, returned often enough, and become part of the rhythm of a neighborhood.
Of course, if I'm being frank, the best invitations were into the homes within your circles.
This is where some relationships grew deeper and became long-lasting.
It was in a few of those homes where I first learned to play mahjong—sitting around a table with fellow expats, learning the tiles, the rhythms, the sometimes chaotic competition that somehow always ended in laughter. It became a ritual that carried us through our second chapter in Tokyo, right up until we repatriated in 2022.
But life there was not only social—it was purposeful. Serving within the international community, making friends with locals with the biggest, most giving hearts, supporting other expat families who were finding their footing in a foreign city…It all reminded me that showing up for others has a way of rooting you in a place.
It deepened friendships and, over time, deepened me.
The city sharpened my eye in small ways. The quiet choreography of commuters lining up exactly where the train doors will open. The way even the smallest neighborhood café paid attention to detail—the placement of a cup, the seasonality of a display, the care given to something seemingly ordinary.
Tokyo taught me that belonging can be built intentionally.
We miss Tokyo more than we say out loud—the kind of missing that surfaces unexpectedly, in a smell or a song or an ordinary Tuesday. It’s why we try to return at least once a year. We reconnect with the friends who became chosen family, sit at familiar tables, and walk the same streets that held us through two completely different seasons of parenting—toddlers and teenagers, beginnings and almost-goodbyes.
New Orleans formed my rhythm, but Tokyo refined it.
One is inherited love. The other is chosen. One raised me, the other defined a chapter that shaped our entire family. And in this quiet in-between—where children grow and leave and I am learning to edit carefully, to protect what matters—I can see how both cities live inside me.
From New Orleans, savoring.
From Tokyo, sharpening.
From one, roots.
From the other, reach.
Home, I’ve learned, is not a singular location.
Sometimes it is gumbo on the stove and stories that never quite end. Other times it’s a train arriving exactly on time, children growing before your eyes, and friendships that outlast distance.
And sometimes it is the quiet ache of missing a place that changed you so deeply you keep going back.
Because part of you never left.
