After a three-month delay, we finally got to spend a Shabbos in Cherry Hill. Although located in NJ, Cherry Hill is really a suburb of Philly, a LONG shlep from our current perch down the Cape; we’re talking 7-8 hours, without traffic. Now that we have two little pitzels, my aversion to extra-long drives has gotten political, so we did most of the drive Thursday night, crashed with Aunt Renee (”Auntie Nay”, in Yonahspeak) and finished up on Friday afternoon. It was definitely a good move; it’s a little awkward to meet new friends looking like a bedraggled, green-skinned, milk-leaking hose beast with two wailing spawn.

I’ll be honest. Based on first appearances, I was not so thrilled with Cherry Hill. I had pictured something a little more rural, a little farther away from the many malls and highways that comprise Jersey’s major claim to fame (well, that, and the birthplace of Thomas Edison). But, I swallowed my disappointment and decided to look beyond “Borders” and get to know the people. After all, a great friend is worth a million blades of grass (Eat your heart out, Walt Whitman…).

It was a wise decision, because the people of Cherry Hill are absolutely lovely, and they absolutely love where they live. Comparatively, it’s a very small community of only a few hundred families, but in my book this is a very good thing. People smile as they walk by you in shul; they say hello and ask your name. Trust me, this is a REALLY big deal coming from the extra-large Jew-pot of Teaneck, where Shuie and I lived for the first year and change after we got hitched. There are nice people in Teaneck, but if you don’t move in knowing someone, you might as well consider yourself eating lunch alone in the cafeteria for the rest of the year.

Another thing I like about the community is how diverse it is, and yet how connected. Saturday night I was invited to a women’s Rosh Chodesh gathering where a woman gave a little class and then we had a dance party — That’s right; yours truly stayed out dancing until midnight! The woman who spoke wore a sheitel and fully tznius (modest) garb, but there were also women there in all sorts of get-ups, everything from skirts to jeans. Some wore hats, some wore tichels and some wore no head covering at all. But everyone was friends. There were no lines between “them” and “us”. It was just a group of Jewish women of all kinds celebrating the new month together by learning some Torah and doing the Macarena. It was awesome.

My greatest discovery was Chani and Baruch Seff, another young couple with four gorgeous kids who also happen to be connected with my trippy-hippy, crunchy-granola Carlebach tribe. Chani and I immediately connected and I felt a sense of excitement that, should we choose to move to Cherry Hill, I would do so already having a friend. There were a few other colorful characters that I fell in love with immediately, including Devorah Ahavah, a fabulous sixty-something poetess who told me to check her out on YouTube, where she’d posted four poems about Hashem. A majority of the community are ba’alei tshuva like me, people who weren’t born religious, but came to it later in life (always makes for the most interesting stories!), and so lack judgment or expectation of each other. You can come as you are, make yourself comfortable, and take whatever you want from the fridge.

I was also excited to see Yonah have a million other kids his age to play with. It was such a stark contrast to being on the Cape, where Yonah’s social life extends as far as me, Shuie and Kivie, his pre-teen friends at Chabad, his weekly playgroup (at which we have been absent since Kivie was born) and his daily dates with Elmo. It’s also great to be only an hour and a half away from Simi and Huvi, so they can be more a part of our everyday lives. So we’ll see. No decisions have to be made today, and I’m glad, because between exhaustion and hormones, a choice like that seems monolithic at the moment.

It’s funny, though. Despite the longing I feel to actually settle somewhere after all this wandering we’ve been doing, the prospect of it becoming a reality scares me a little. Like it or not, I am still a gypsy. I’m afraid of getting “stuck” somewhere, that I will fall into a black hole of everyday life that will block me from accomplishing the aspirations I have for myself. Realistically speaking, I am going to be caught up in the mundane for a while — I’m a nursing mother, for crying out loud — but I have to remember that it’s not always going to be like this. I’ve already managed to get an article published, with another coming up (Yup, Aish.com is going to publish another one of my pieces!), and when I have more than one hand free again I will probably be able to do more. Not just that, but if I give myself enough time to actually ease into a place, I may turn around one day and realize that a community has sprung up around me and that I have actual friends who live around the block, instead of four hours away. There may be some amazing people and opportunities waiting to come into my life, if I let them.

The other part that’s hard about making this choice is that it means officially leaving behind the dream my mother had for us. She had hoped, as did we, that we would all end up living in the Boston area, a part of each other’s lives, raising each other’s children and just growing closer as a family. With her death, we’ve each been forced to search for our own sense of belonging and to build our own lives. Unfortunately, those lives probably won’t end up looking the way we may have once thought they would. We’re all being led in different directions, and despite our love for each other, that may lead us to different places. But there’s only so long you can hold on to a hope, or a memory, before real life steps in and forces you to let go. Pretty soon, it’s going to be time to move on, and I will, for myself and my family. But it might not be as easy as I’d thought.