While cleaning out boxes of “save” items I’d been storing in my parents’ attic, I found a binder of my favorite things. I was assigned to make the binder in fourth grade and apparently could not part with it all these years. I had promised my parents I’d clean up my hoarding habit before moving out of the house and was thus waist high in childhood memories. Despite the fact that I regret having packed away one too many failed art class projects, I am so happy I kept the binder. Nearly twenty years later, the binder still reflects many of my favorite things. Among descriptions of my favorite ice cream flavor (green tea!), dream job (hmm?), and animal (pig please), I rediscovered two of my absolute favorite quotations.

On the first page of the binder is a list of facts about where I grew up. Slapped smack dab in the middle of the page is a proverb I must have cut out from a cheesy article in one of my mom's issues of Ladies' Home Journal--“Home is where the heart is." Even as a nine year old I recognized that home was not a street address, but the place where you were loved and loved back and something in my fourth grade self must have known how important that little proverb would be someday. In 2010 I moved to Paris to be with someone who stole my heart almost a decade before. As hesitant as I was to leave behind my family, friends, and familiar life, I could not do long distance a second longer. But that doesn’t mean the transition has been or will be easy. I have what I need most in my life (mon amour, bien sûr), but there are certainly ways to make the City of Light feel more like home sweet home.

To put the final decorative touch on my binder, I glued a picture of myself grinning from cheek to cheek. Below the super ridiculous glamor shot, I taped one last quotation—“Everyone is about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Today and everyday, I try to keep these words in the back of my mind. Paris is a dream, but only if you make it one and that I am off to do!