The day before we were to leave, an email popped up on my phone. I snuck away from work and teeth because it was from The Kid’s teacher, and it was a video. My boy was walking.

He’s taken those myriad first unsure steps, the wobbly efforts mired in hesitation and caution. He’s lumbered around the house and backyard with his hand holding our fingers or pushing his toy lawnmower. But this–this was new. This was wobbly, sure, but it was solo and it was confident and it was joyful. I grinned widely there in my hiding place at work, then I played the video for the staff and counted down the minutes until I would witness this miracle firsthand. Sure, kids learn to walk every day. But the road our kid had to getting there was strewn with tests and evaluations and uncertainty. And now, at this particular finish line, our celebration was the sweeter for it.

We had to leave him for the weekend, since The Husband and I were booked on a flight back to the city we left three years ago. It’s a trip we told each other we would make annually, but we all know how that goes when life happens. Still, two years later, we arrived at LaGuardia, this time without a baby on board. And when our cab delivered us to midtown and my feet hit Manhattan soil (which is concrete), TH and I smiled widely at each other. Back to where it all began.

And I do mean ALL. The gifts this city gave me are invaluable: the recovery of a formerly misunderstood faith, reinterpreted by grace. The confidence born of independence, of making it here and thereby making it anywhere. Friendships with future bridesmaids and lifelong confidantes. Oh–and a husband.

We ventured down to the subway, feeling like locals again. In the light rain and cold wind, we gazed up at the new World Trade Tower, finished in time for our arrival. We walked through Tribeca and Soho and to Babbo, where we grabbed unlikely seats at the bar and lingered over an early-bird dinner served by a waitress with an attitude. We met friends old and new and drank too much. We went to brunch at Stanton Social, where I threw up in the sink. Sorry, Stanton Social. We lingered on our hotel’s rooftop pool deck. We sat at the Burger Joint. We walked through our old neighborhoods, and around Gramercy Park and down Irving Place and through the West Village. We woke up for a 9 am movie accompanied by bagels from our old neighborhood shop. We marveled at all that had changed (my old wine bar closed–I guess my patronage meant more to their income than I knew; plus–Citi bikes!) and all that hadn’t (somehow my apartment was going on without me, along with the drycleaner downstairs).

And our last night, before a dinner at Alta, we stepped into the Hunter College auditorium and claimed seats down front, in the area where I stood next to him the night after we became more than friends and wondered what was next. We listened to that old story that never changes, yet somehow always tells us something new–the anthem of grace, spoken in a familiar voice. Home stretched across hundreds of miles.

I have to admit, I was scared to go. My worst-case-scenario brain imagined plane crashes, terrorist activity–you name it. Frederick Buechner said, though, that “you do not solve the mystery–you live the mystery.” And the not knowing is where courage is born; the acts taken in courage are flags of hope planted in what looks like uncertain ground but turns out to be sacred. Sacred enough to become the footprint of a tower rising 1,776 feet high, changing the Manhattan skyline forever, as I gaze at it from a cab window and head toward a boy whose every step is an act of grace and a song of joy.