I’ve hidden the last of the boxes until I’m ready to deal with them.

Not too happy the refrigerator doesn’t seem to work, I’ll be eating takeout for a while, until I find time to get it fixed.

But there’s a bouquet of flowers on my counter from my new downstairs neighbor (who kindly allowed the neighbors to cart the bed box spring and the sofa through her entire home, to winch it from her balcony to my balcony, because they wouldn’t fit up the stairs).

The cable got hooked up on move-in day (miracle), and even bigger miracle: The moment my massive moving truck arrived, two parking spaces magically appeared … in Dupont Circle, next to a crosswalk … just 40 feet from my new home. (I didn’t know I was supposed to apply for moving permits for the street. I could have been facing hundreds of dollars in parking bills.)

This must be meant to be.

I bought a condo for my parents a few years back, but this is the first place I’ve bought in this country for me (hence my long silence, with this friend not dropping by for weeks at a time, as I dealt with mortgage lenders and home inspectors — who missed the fridge problem — etc.).

This is not where I expected to be.

But as I sit here listening to the rain and the birds I did not expect to hear in the middle of a city on a Sunday morning, I am finding a measure of peace. I need it.

You know those years you spend madly rushing from thing to thing, where the only important thing becomes getting to that next item on the agenda, and ticking it off? You try to put your all into each event, but toward the end of the hour or two, your smile becomes brittle, your gaze unfocused as you find you’re not concentrating anymore on the conversation in front of you, but instead, on that next thing on the list. (What is it? When is it? Will it be tough like this?)

You do not live with passion.

You live to endure it — just one long marathon you hope will have meaning in the end.

So here I am, I have stopped. And am now looking back at that checklist, and all those unprocessed, head-long, mad-rush moments.

Not to belabor the point, but I spent the last almost-three years first recovering from a car-bomb attack in Iraq (yes, here she goes again), then learning how to walk/run again, then telling the story, again and again and again. First I told it because I had a compulsive need to. Then I told it because it seemed ordinary folks were getting more from me than I realized possible — or rather from the story. I tried to be the abstract deliverer of it, trying to make it more every-man than about some 40-ish reporter woman; getting through trauma and coming out with something positive on the other side is a cloak we all are forced to pick up at some time in our lives. Sometimes, as with me recently, many times in our lives.