More wanderings

My midwestern sojourn has come to an end, and what an end it was! Saturday night I attended the wedding of two beloved friends, and although I had planned to leave early (because of my four-thirty-am wake up the next morning), it was impossible to tear myself away. So: three hours of sleep, a bleary-eyed shuttle ride to the airport, two cramped flights, and a drive home, only to throw on my dress again and attend the wedding reception of another friend (my flight arrived too late for the ceremony). I was ever so glad to be able to be at both weddings, but I did a zombie swan dive into bed when I got home from the second one.

Another reason it was hard to leave Saturday's party: Over the course of those two weeks, including a fantastic bachelorette party in a swanky Chicago condo overlooking the lake, and the pre-wedding preparations, I had gotten to know some of my friend's friends. And--as is logical, since we are all friends with the same awesome person--I was really enjoying their company. But when it was all over, it was farewell for good--when would we see each other again?

Oh, and the Indiana wedding was my first Jewish wedding ever! And it was so much fun. I do believe I shed tears during the hora, when the inner circle of family members widened and intertwined and spun and linked arms. So darn...sob...symbolic!

Anyway, the two weeks flew by in a good way. The first week I stayed with the soon-to-be-marrieds, and the second week I housesat for some people from my old church, which was a good deal given that I got to use their car and only was required to water a few plants. We cooked lots of yummy food, including my first batch of homemade gnocchi and the best paella I've personally ever made (which isn't saying much, but it was delicious). I spent a lot of time holed up in the library and had a series of meetings about teaching in the fall and about my thesis with the department chair and my committee people, which all went swimmingly. And speaking of swimming, there were bits of Bloomington summer fun in the sweltering heat: the outdoor pool (the night swim was possibly the most peaceful swim I've ever taken), the always delightful farmer's market, porch swings and strolls to the ice cream stand and fireflies and flowers. And there were wedding projects! Buying plants and jars and potting terraria for the wedding centerpieces, cutting out and inscribing seed-packet name cards...

I was reminded of what I like about Bloomington, and all the reasons it might be fun to live there during the school year. That said, there is still some debate as to whether I will actually be there in the fall. If I am, though, the Mister will be tagging along, and that, my friends, is a good thing. (Boy do I miss that boy!)

Now we're off to Boston, for just a quick stay and a celebration of my nephew's fourth birthday, and then down to Washington, where I'll be staying with my parents for a couple of weeks, until the Mister flies in and it's time to head back up to Boston and Vermont. It is a wandering kind of summer, that's for sure.

Living the questions

"Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves liked locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

- Ranier Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

Squish

This has happened before. I leave home to embark on a long American sojourn, and I abandon this little blog, which languishes while I galavant.

I guess the reason is partly because I am seeing the actual people who form my primary blog audience, and partly because I'm, well, on the road. And come to think of it, not much more time has gone by than the usual too-long gap between blog posts; the difference is that I've been more places in the meantime and family life landmarks overbrim the mere record of them.

But just to keep track, I'll enumerate my recent whereabouts. Basically, it's been a tour of the Northeast Corridor. Two weeks ago today (only two weeks?), I flew to Philadelphia, and so did the Mister, although not on the same airline. Boo. Then we drove (er, were driven) to Bucks County to attend my brother's wedding, and sing in it, and in general be happy that I have one more sister-in-law to add to my collection of Awesome Sisters-In-Law. They had a exquisite day, the ceremony was delightful, and the bride and groom were beautiful. Our nephew ever so studiously and carefully carried the little pillow, and forlornly asked at the end of the day, "Am I still a ring bearer?" There was a moment of panic before the ceremony when my dad noticed that one of the rings was missing from the pillow, but did not realize that they were aluminum stand-ins.

The post-wedding day was one of intense Hanging Out with all the lovely friends and relatives who were present. (As the Mister noted, the English phrase "to hang out" is a great catch-all that doesn't actually mean much. Case in point: one can "hang out by [one]self.") The kind of thing where breakfast turns into a four-hour gabfest with all the people who are coming and going in the hotel breakfast nook, plus snatches of the Sunday New York Times. A whirlwind Philadelphia visit ended the weekend. I hadn't been there since my childhood, so it was fun to revisit the Liberty Bell, take a carriage ride and be impressed by good ol' Ben Franklin all over again. I never did get a water ice, though.

After the wedding weekend a bunch of the immediate family caravaned down to DC, where my Dad has new digs for his temporary job. We spent the week eating and museuming and yes, hanging out, and I got some solid time to research at the Library of Congress (getting a library card is always a thrill, but this one was special) and the Mister had meetings where he gave talks and debates and so forth.

We made a trip to the Natural History Museum, too: after my nephew and I gazed at the record-length squid for a good while, he rushed over to my sister and said breathlessly, "Mom! I just saw a giant SQUISH!"

The Mister flew back home last Friday, and I spent Saturday in the back of a minivan with a lot of luggage and two adorable squirts as we drove up to Boston's North Shore. We had a lovely time together for a few days, and managed to get together with the newlyweds, tanned and honeymoon-glowy. Then down to Boston for a couple of days at my brother's with the littlest nephew, and now on Saturday it's off to the great midwest for the next chapter of this summer marathon!

It's a bare-bones record, but it's the last few weeks in a nutshell. Still, there are times when lists of places visited do not suffice; so much joy and even sorrow is squished into such a fragile frame. The unsaid will have to remain so, the lists a reminder of the lived.

Should

I shouldn't be blogging. I should be:

1. packing

2. writing any of a gazmillion emails I have to write

3. attending to details for renting for the downtown apartment (new renters move in soon! but too many pesky things to do/fix/print/sign/move)

4. finding housing for a semester

5. finding housing for several of the five cities of my summer peregrinations

6. buying plane tickets and changing old ones

7. sorting through rafts and reams of papers and books to figure out which ones to take with me, with is basically:

8. packing

I really would like to bury my head in a hole, ostrich-style. (Do ostriches really do that? Or is that a myth?)

Oh! I would also like to write about Hungary, and how cool Budapest was, but that's not what I should be doing.

I should be packing.

May days

I realized the last post is a little too "woe is me!" so I should add that despite it all, it's May, and May in my opinion is The Best Month. When I was in high school, my birthday was just a week before a good friend's birthday, and in calculus class we declared those five days--by writing the words across the empty squares in my calendar--a week of AWESOMENESS. So in my mind, when May rolls around, the awesomeness begins.

This weekend we celebrated my birthday and my sister-in-law's birthday and my father-in-law's saint day in an omnibus outdoor dinner, and I got to choose new clothes from my mother-in-law's store, always a fun prospect. Meanwhile, back in New England, celebrations for my nephew's birthday and my mother's birthday (today!!!) and mother's day and some April birthdays thrown into the mix were also underway. It's a transatlantic party for both sides of our family!

The weather is perfect, the kind of weather I wish it could be year-round, sun and breezes and cool evenings. Our plants are going gangbusters, the balcony doors are permanently thrown open, and even though I don't like the haircut I got yesterday, my husband tells me I'm pretty.

Like I said: awesomeness.

Happy birthday, mom!

Budapest

One would think that we've got enough on our plates, what with moving a truck of stuff out of one apartment in order to trip over it in another apartment, and with cleaning and fixing up yet another apartment so we can (finally!) get renters moved in. Oh, and there's the question of preparing for our trip to the US next week, which for me may turn into a seven-month stretch rather than a two-month vacation if I decide to just change my return ticket instead of buying new ones. Because it seems that I am going to be back at my university stomping grounds in order to teach for the fall semester. Which also means finding yet another apartment to live in (will we never tire of not living in one place?), and also implies the terrifying prospect of packing a suitcase that will suffice for seven months.

But no! That's not enough, evidently, because we're leaving for Budapest on Thursday. Thursday, as in the day after tomorrow. The trip--the Mister will be speaking at a conference and I'll be a plus one--is actually a compromise, because he was initially planning to be in Budapest and then Bucharest until next Wednesday night (we leave for Philadelphia on Thursday morning). I said I didn't that would be a good idea, except I said it in a slightly more forceful manner. But after we ruled out Bucharest, compared to returning the day before our flight to the US, returning four days before from a shorter trip seemed totally doable, and I was tempted by the glittering idea of a weekend escapade in a country and a city I've never visited. So I said I'd go along, and that's how I find myself about to go to Budapest.

Maybe Budapest will be a good break, though, because all of the other stuff is, to say the least, stressful. I'm nearly paralyzed by the magnitude of "to-do" and the spiral of "what-if" and the sadness of "don't-want-to-leave." The not wanting to leave Barcelona part is not just about spending Fall Semester in the great wide midwest; it's also about the Mister being a candidate for a (really really fantastic and prestigious) job in.... Brussels. Yes, the place that sapped our energies over several years with its uncannily gray skies, and the place that we just turned our backs on in a diesel-puff of exhaust smoke.

Which is why I'm counting on Budapest, one B-city that at least has no emotional connotations in my life, to be a clean slate of a weekend getaway.

Beastly

In my last post, I referred to the van as a beast, and I after four solid days of driving it, I did not waver from this opinion. We encountered a bit of everything: mountains and rain tempests and hailstorms and border-crossing traffic, and I freaked out regularly (am I doing this right? is the engine supposed to sound like that? what gear am I supposed to be in? should I wait for him to move or try to squeeze into that spot? how will I get out of this space? what if something is behind me and I can't see it?). We learned that big huge vans, especially ones loaded with books and furniture, go pretty slowly, and that it takes sixteen instead of twelve hours to travel from Barcelona to Brussels or vice versa. But there were long stretches of smooth sailing, I learned to trust my sideview mirrors and find the clutch's sweet spot, and we had really good luck across the board.

First of all, the city driving went very well on both ends. And secondly, we were buoyed by the kindness of strangers and friends: the passer-by who parallel-parked the van for me in a tight spot (in front of our house!) in Brussels, the neighbor who carried furniture down the stairs with the Mister, the car rental agent who gave us a 35% discount, the neighbors who took other items off our hands for us, the Sicilians at our favorite neighborhood pizza place, the friend who cooked us dinner when we had no kitchen, the friend who gave us a ride when we didn't want to move the perfectly parked van, family who arranged for help when we arrived in Barcelona, and so on.

We sure did need help; those four days of driving were interposed with one and a half days of frantic packing and paperwork and carting of heavy objects up and down many flights of stairs. The good news is that the van is gone and the stuff is now in our apartment, even the sofa (we planned to sell it, but the buyer backed out and the van was so big that we could take it for its first road trip to Barcelona).

The bad news is that the stuff is now in our apartment.

As in, we now have two households worth of things crammed into our already-small space. This morning we did some major rearranging to accommodate piles of boxes and suitcases and furniture, none of which we have room for. I'm quite disheartened by the impossibility of it all, and the major projects we will have to tackle just to incorporate and/or sell or give away the stuff we didn't have time to deal with in Brussels. On our drive back, we solemnly vowed never to buy anything ever again.

But it feels really good to have one less household. For the first time all of our wedding gifts are in one place! My summer clothes and my winter clothes are in the same city! The two Murakami books that were in Brussels can sit on the shelf next to the two that were in Barcelona! All of our financial records can be merged! And so forth and so on. All thanks to the beast.

First gear

Of the rental car companies that I consulted, only one had vans available that we could take out of the country. But they were out of minivans, so we had to go with a cargo van, the size-of a nine-passenger dealio. But then they didn't have any of those actually in the lot, so we were upgraded to an even bigger size, the kind with the roof pushed up like a bouffant hairdo.

The idea of me driving this beast through the French countryside is simultaneously amusing and terrifying. We have reservations at a little bed and breakfast for tonight, but I have visions of getting the van wedged into a tiny village lane, so I might just end up parking on the shoulder of the highway and hiking in from there (kidding, I think).

I've hardly driven in Barcelona, and never in Brussels, so I'm also nervous about negotiating my way in and out of the cities, neither of which is known for its pleasant and patient drivers. I guess there's something to be said for learning as you go, but: gulp!

If you need me, you'll find me in the slow lane.