The Water Dispenser Test
Or, How I Accidentally Became a Floridian
Not long ago, I wrote a post called Rootless and Rooted, reflecting on a retired military man who moved twenty-four times with his family and managed to turn a life in motion into an unexpected kind of permanence. At the time, I wrote it as someone who—if I’m being honest—didn’t think I had moved very much at all.
Sure, I’ve changed zip codes. I grew up in the farm-rolled hills of Hunterdon County, New Jersey. Spent some formative years in Cambridge, Massachusetts at college. Did a stint in Southern California—mostly sunshine, traffic, and youthful delusions of invincibility. But eventually, I boomeranged back to New Jersey, landing just forty minutes from where I started. It wasn’t exactly a voyage of Odyssean proportions.
Through the years, I watched my father build. Houses, commercial projects—you name it. There was a quiet dignity in the way he could transform blueprints into brick and mortar. I wanted that for myself. And just before COVID rearranged the collective furniture of the planet, my wife and I built our dream home in New Jersey. The “we” matters here. If the dream was mine, the reality was certainly ours.
So, you can imagine my surprise when, after all that, we found ourselves pointing southward—to Florida.
This wasn’t a retirement move. It wasn’t even, initially, a “real” move. It started as a whisper, a practical conversation shaped by economics, lifestyle shifts, and whatever post-COVID had done to our collective psyche. We bought a house. We started renovating. We are adding an addition. Somehow, without really trying, I found myself overseeing construction projects again.
Of course, “working from home” meant working from both homes. And for the better part of a year, my Florida life existed entirely within two guest bedrooms. One held a couch I called an “office.” The other graduated from an AeroBed to a real mattress—a promotion that felt oddly ceremonial. There was no kitchen for a while, and at one point, even using a toilet was a choose-your-own-adventure challenge. This was not exactly the Florida they sell in glossy brochures, but it did have Wi-Fi!
Still, we made do. The water cooler became a small but symbolic battleground. That hideous five-gallon jug perched like a plastic gargoyle atop a white box for months, until we replaced it with a bottom-loading, button-pumping model that whispered, “Yes, you live here now.”
And yet—even through all this, I continued returning to New Jersey as if nothing had changed. I’d drop back into my “real” life up north like someone flipping to an earlier chapter in a novel: same desk, same groceries, same neural pathways. It was comforting. Familiar. Predictable. Until it wasn’t.
The Blender Bottle Epiphany
Not long ago, after spending about three weeks straight in Florida—not my longest stint—I came back to New Jersey. I walked into the kitchen, half-awake, clutching my well-worn Blender Bottle. Without thinking, I reached for the water cooler to fill it.
Except I couldn’t.
I stood there, confused. Hand hovering. Eyes squinting. For a full five seconds, I couldn’t remember how the old water dispenser worked. You’d think I was trying to disarm a bomb with no instruction manual. Push the top? Tilt the bottle? Wait—does this one even have a button?
And just like that, I had a quiet, slightly ridiculous epiphany: it takes less than three weeks to start rewiring your life. Or at least your muscle memory. The human brain, it turns out, is frighteningly adaptable. If a man can forget how to use his own water cooler after 21 days away, maybe the rest of this “transition” thing isn’t so complicated after all.
We often assume that change is monumental. That becoming someone new—or living somewhere new—requires a dramatic unmooring of identity, place, and purpose. But sometimes, it’s as simple as a different faucet, a new morning light, a rearrangement of routine. The question, then, isn’t how long it takes to adjust. It’s how much of ourselves is built out of the habits we mistake for home.
If I can feel off-kilter because the water doesn’t come out the way I now expect it to, maybe I’m already more of a Floridian than I’d admit.
So, What’s Really Home?
There’s no bow to tie this up with. No motivational poster quote. Just a moment: standing in my kitchen in New Jersey, missing a water dispenser in Florida. Laughing at myself. Realizing that perhaps this life of two places isn’t a phase—it’s just life. Rooted and rootless, again. One foot here, the other there.
It’s not just about which zip code holds your furniture. It’s about which version of you wakes up in the morning and says, this feels right… today. And the truth is, both do.
That may be all the definition of “home” I need for now. And if not, well, at least the water’s cold wherever I am.
