Habits are funny things. Good or bad, I always find mine to be a security blanket of sorts – those I’ve maintained for the longest time bring me the warmest comfort, and even when they fall temporarily by the wayside, I tend to find my way back to them, the same way you can misplace your favorite blanket because you forgot you wore it as a coat into that one part of the house one time and left it there, only to rediscover it weeks later and once again become inseparable for the foreseeable. 

On so many of my days off in London, I would take the tube to Leicester Square and walk down the road to this little sushi chain across the street from the theater that was always showing that Harry Potter play, the one where the logo looks like a child is sitting in a weird copper nest. I would buy the same sushi roll to go, which wasn’t really even sushi as it was mostly comprised of avocado and fried shrimp and those stupidly delicious crunchies, and make my way down the street towards Foyles, eating it as I walked. The amount of time it took to stroll from the sushi shop to the book shop was exactly how long it took me to finish the roll, complete with using the lid to dip each piece in a tiny pool of soy sauce before consumption (I had this all perfected).  

Once at Foyle’s, I’d do a cursory wander through the medieval history section of the store for new arrivals before heading up two flights of stairs to the café and ordering a frosted coconut and lime bar and a pot of English breakfast tea. I would take that tray of food, walk over to the bar height seating that faced the store’s skylit central atrium, and get out my laptop and write. Long fiction, cover letters, plot outlines, blog posts, I would just write. Sometimes I would get a second pot of tea, sometimes not. But I would spend hours there, and this whole ritual, from the moment I set foot on the platform at Leicester Square Station to the moment I cleared my tray and began walking down the six floors of laminate stairs back out to Tottenham Court Road, continues to be one of my favorite and most enduring memories of my time in London.  

I’m finally in a place where I feel like I can develop new habits, habits like that one, habits beyond the weekly grocery shop and completing a Monday through Friday work week. So while this morning was a lazy Saturday spent with Aaron and the cat, in the afternoon I set off into town to try and find that blanket that I’d accidentally worn as a coat into that one part of the house and left there.  

The town of Sumner is about a fifteen-minute drive from where we live. Its Main Street has that classic Historic District feel, where for a good two hundred yards you can walk past brick Gold Rush buildings, pick through some vintage malls, and peruse a used bookstore before ending at a coffee shop next to the train tracks. It is one of the places I take anyone that comes to visit – my bestie and her partner last June, my sister in October, my mom a month into living here last April – because while Seattle, yes, is only half an hour north, the truth is that Aaron and I don’t really have much to do with it all that often. Sumner is tiny and unknown and quiet, but it still boasts views of Rainier and is honestly a more realistic interpretation of where we live. And now, in the most unintentional way because of an unintentional habit with all of our visitors, it reminds me of people that I love that don’t live nearby. 

Laptop out and a Word document open, I was halfway through my latte and on the last bite of my apple pie donut from the coffee shop by the train tracks when I discovered a solitary blue sprinkle stuck in its frosting. And even though there was nothing blue or sprinkled about that coconut lime bar I would religiously consume at Foyles, there was something about that moment, and that sprinkle, and all of the memories in between, that just really brought me a feeling of joy. For habits near and far, long lost or yet to happen. Just a sudden, comforting feeling of warmth.  

It’s been an afternoon well spent.