Life, she decided, was settling into a comfortable soundtrack.

The days each had their own arrangement of music, varying from morning to afternoon and sometimes from hour to hour, between the classical orderliness of meetings, easygoing R&B and jazz for working at home, and random outbreaks of hiphop or rock during city adventures.

She had thought- oh so mistakenly- that sometime after her arrival in the country life would settle into a pattern. But there was no rhythm to these days whatsoever. The only solidity at all was that (generally) she and her roommates were asleep between 3 and 7 am. Thanks to the invention of laptops, she could do her work at any hour and at any location (top picks? 11pm while away babysitting, 9am next to the kitchen radiator, and 4pm at the coffeeshop.) Meals were eaten whenever and wherever hunger struck (top picks? a 5pm gyro while riding a bike home, 3am cold cornbread with a book, an orange on the way to volleyball, and noon-ish espressos and crepes on a weekend.)

Food, though, had maintained the magic of community in a shifting life. Some mornings, after long weeks or late nights, the only words spoken were, "Do you want coffee?" Some evenings, "Do you want soup?" was an innocent beginning to hours of hanging out. Inviting friends over for meals - and the subsequent preparation and cleanup - made the often-empty apartment suddenly feel like a home.

The only thing was, she learned... not to expect more than there was. To be content with the serendipity of hot coffee, the occasional hug, and spontaneous adventure offers. And to adopt the motto she found inscribed on an old building - "faber est suae quisque fortunae," Latin for "each man is the maker of his own fortune"....