Going Home
Today the final detail locked into place and we're now ticketed and certificated and everything else we need to be ready to go. We are packing up in this, the 13th place we've stayed in during this long journey since Fall 2022 that has involved either selling, giving away, packing up or leaving everything we have ever know and setting off for the Old World. Most of our stuff will come along later in containers; we have with us two carry ons, four checked bags, and one laid back medium-sized chocolate Labrador Retriever. That we are flying on one way tickets makes it strangely real.
Back when we first bought the property in Portugal I was full of trepidation. Was it the right decision? Would the work be too hard, too discouraging, too full of stoppers? I read the Facebook pages of other people fixing up old houses which both eased and fed my fears.
"We're not other people," the h says matter-of-factly. "We're a crew."
After we signed on the dotted line and handed over the check, I decided not to look back. We'd taken the leap; now there was nothing for it but to embrace it totally. I'm still amazed at us on the first night, going through the house opening doors and windows that had been nailed shut for decades, finding the room with the best view and pitching our tent. That night we slept on thin camping mats in sleeping bags, using piles of clothes for a pillow. The next night we had a mattress topper, pillows and freshly laundered sheets, and went to sleep listening to music in soft candlelight.
A few nights later we were going to bed after cooking a good meal in our own kitchen and the whole place fully vacuumed.
That's the good thing about a huge job like the one we've undertaken - every day there is some measurable progress no matter how small. Cabinets reconditioned, old carpeting and fake wood flooring pulled up, old light fixtures and wallpaper pulled down, trash of the previous owners disposed of, old cups and dishes found, cleaned and re-purposed - so many in fact we could hold a dinner party of twenty on our found dishes sitting on our found chairs.
Yesterday I heard a song with the word California in it and I became overwhelmed with nostalgia and cried a little. Why the tears, the h asks. I think it's just acknowledgement what a wonderful place it has been to live, it has been a real golden time of our lives raising our daughter in this city at the close of the last century.
There is nostalgia but like Gwen Stefani there is no doubt; we've made the decision that is right for us. I don't just feel it, I know it, in so many ways:
I know it in the anxiousness I feel about getting back, getting going with all of our many projects. Before we had our residency visas in hand we spent a few months working around the place. There is always something that needs doing, you have to guard against them crowding you and keeping you from finishing what you started.
I know it in the way I know my next project (beyond getting the chicken coop ready for the hens,) is planting marigolds in the front courtyard. I'm also thinking purple morning glories where the English Ivy used to crawl the length of the chicken wire fence that borders the vegetable garden. These are my mom's favorite flowers, past and present, and now they will greet the h's mom when she comes next month.
Though this will be the first home I have as a fatherless girl in the world, it won't be a home without the imprint of my father. Like dad at the old place, we have a koi pond. After they sold the house dad was visibly distraught about missing his fish but not wanting to make a fuss. Our plan is to install a sitting stone among the bamboo, a place dad himself might have liked to sit. The koi will peep shyly at me, and recognize me in that way they do that so charmed dad.
I know it's the right decision from the way the house itself feels to me, even from the first as I walked around the then-weedy glass-littered courtyards and weather-stained walls: it felt safe, like a fortress that could hide me in its labyrinth but also lead the world right to me if you don't mind a few levels and portals.. Just go through the front gate, then through the palaceta gate and the double front doors, straight up the stairs all the way to the top where there is a kind of Little Women-esque writer's garret.
If I'm not there, then reverse yourself and proceed up the cottage steps, through the gate, up the second set of steps, and through the bright blue door (first turning to admire the view that spreads almost all the way to downtown Belas) and noticing the fresh scent of flowers as you proceed through the archway inside and there I'll be, writing in the cottage kitchen with the door open behind me so the smell of the garden can come in.
....if I'm not there, then for sure I'll be in the poolhouse; reverse down to the gate separating the two flights of steps and make a left, opening the little gate to the walkway behind the orange orchard; head up the steps, across the lower courtyard, up the steps again and now you're at the pool house that opens onto the upper courtyard of red and white tile.
These places will be my favorite places to write because in my imagination I'm already doing it. The people in the world who know me best will know to look for me in these places without being told, because love is like that.
As I have prepared to leave the summer song of the frogs down by the pond at night has given way to the bittersweet sound of the crickets and their song of impending fall. The geese fly overhead in great, honking Vs. There air is a elegy of summer warmth and a breath of autumnal cool. While spring is the season most associated with renewal, for me that has always been the fall, and the start of a new school year. Going to a new country is very re-newing to the point of being uncomfortable though only a little. It's not bad to be comfortable with being a little uncomfortable, and it's not even hard, once you've learned how quickly something you're at first uncomfortable with becomes something you're super comfortable with, even something you cannot live without. That's how the place already feels -like home.
We're going home, and I can't wait.
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