This is the time of year when I really love where I live. The streets are lined with trees drooping heavy with pink and white blossoms, like big fat balls of cotton wool, raining their petals down at the bump of a branch. The weather is my absolute favourite type: jeans-and-sandals temperature. Not too hot, but definitely warm. The sky is blazing blue, I can hear a woodpecker somewhere in the trees, and we’re digging out the shorts and wondering if last summer’s Keens might possibly still fit.

This neighbourhood is an oasis of small-town life in deepest suburbia. Once you venture beyond its bounds, you’re on the big anonymous roads with ugly strip malls and chain stores – Target, Safeway, Giant, Payless Shoes… nothing fancy, just the basics. They’re pretty soulless and indistinguishable from any other Targets, Giants, Safeways, Paylesses. But inside the bounds, it’s a village. We have a selection of one-of-a-kind establishments: a (really) greasy spoon, a takeout pizza joint, a barber’s, a shop that sells Keno tickets and hats, a Lebanese cafe that’s a live music venue too – and a co-op supermarket that’s not part of a chain. The first time I stepped inside it, I was transported back to supermarkets in the west of Ireland, the sort you went to when you were on your summer holidays, where they sold things with funny-looking labels and there was a distinctive smell and if you were lucky they had soft-serve ice cream.

Our local Co-op doesn’t have soft serve (at least, I don’t think it does) but it has that same distinctive smell, and exactly the same ladies at the cash registers – except instead of soft Galway accents they have Maryland ones. I don’t get that same spine-tingling thrill of nostalgia every time I walk through the doors any more, because I’m there at least twice a week; but I do still appreciate how special it is to be in a supermarket that’s not a chain, that’s different from everywhere else, that has wine and beer (not the norm in this state), and where I’ll usually see someone to say hi to around at least one turn of an aisle.

My mother stopped shopping at her local supermarket because she didn’t want to meet people she knew. Not that she’s anti-social; I think more because she’d stand there chatting for half an hour and the whole morning would be gone. I think I’ve already heard my children announce, in a deprecating tone that sounds oddly familiar, “…and then Mom met someone.”

But that’s what I love about it. I love that on any weekday morning I’ll drive the girl to school and pass at least two cars whose drivers I can wave hi to. I love that I’ll bump into a mom I know in the supermarket (to whom I can chat at length, or just say hi). I love that I know the fruit guy in Safeway and that the meat-counter lady asks where my baby is – followed by a laughing acknowledgment that she’s not a baby any more.

Much as I miss where I used to belong, I love that we belong here, because that makes it a home.