Well, the Italy end of the holiday fun list has drawn to a close, and the time has come to rev up the home-time end: as of today, I have 17 days to enjoy in my childhood home, and I’m hoping to savor these precious moments with my parents (hard won, after how the past year has gone) as much as I can.
Continue reading “Home-time Holiday Fun List”
Well, I am on my way back to the US for the home-time portion of this holiday season, so I feel it’s time to review my holiday fun list for the Italian side of things:
Continue reading “Italy-side holiday fun list review”
No matter how much I try to set myself up for maximum savoring of the holiday season, it always seems to slip through my fingers too quickly. This year, I tried hard not to crowd too much work into (moderate success), to wrap up lingering to-do list items before it started (mild success), and to make and enjoy a list of fun activities to try to capture the season, and while I think I succeeded at least to some extent in all of those things, I still feel like the time has flown by faster than I could hang onto. I am beginning to suspect there is no cure for this, no way that I will ever feel that I squeezed out every last drop that the season had to offer.
Continue reading “Christmas lights and cozy dinners”
I am rehabilitating this day, and hopefully also this week! Is that a weird statement? Yes, almost certainly, but I figure if I keep repeating it to myself, perhaps I can manifest it.
Continue reading “Recovering from derailment”
After a 2020 full of covid and a 2021 still full of covid but also of other mild to moderate family-related traumas, I had been looking forward to this weekend away with my Italy friend crew with much anticipation, and it did not disappoint. Unfortunately I skidded into Friday evening somewhat exhausted but satisfied after another overly full week of work and then a few hours trekking around Parma after work sourcing the perfect birthday items for my best friend. I plopped into bed on Friday evening wishing that I had a) some time to myself to just exist and regain energy before the weekend, b) enough time to catch up on sleep before leaving, and c) time to pack my weekend bag in a leisurely manner, but I had none of those things.
However, I managed to awake on Saturday reasonably well-rested, in enough time to pack decently well, and with my good mood and anticipation about the weekend fairly restored. From there, the weekend proceeded to be wonderful, including:
Continue reading “Weekend report: Christmas markets and board games”
Taking inspiration from Laura Vanderkam’s seasonal fun lists and also from my own embryonic “lists of fun things to do during X time” from… basically as soon as I knew how to write (my mother likes to tease me about a strictly timed list of fun things to do on a Snow Day from elementary school that I militantly attempted to enforce on her and my brother; it resulted in a meltdown on my part because they failed to adhere to my – admittedly ambitious – schedule), here I am with my list of fun things I’d like to do during holiday season, part 1 (part 2 will be back at my parents’ house in the US).
Continue reading “Italy-side Holiday Fun List”
Is it actually the first weekend of fall? Ehm… no. Did I at least manage to land on the first day of October? Also no! However… we’re all just doing the best we can here, and the first two weeks of teaching back in person completely clobbered me, to say the least. In fact, the last several months and the entire summer kind of clobbered me. So. I’m naming this the first weekend of fall for me personally, and hoping for good things from it. First, though, let’s catch up! Things that have happened in the past two weeks include:
Continue reading “A catching up post for the first weekend of fall”
The last night at home always comes so much more swiftly than I think it will. I love the first night, when my long-planned trip stretches ahead of me. There is usually some kerfuffle to find my sheets (a mystery – why can’t I keep track of them from one trip to the next?) and there is unpacking, and sleep-deprived mildly surreal conversations with my parents over snacks that sit strangely in my stomach. There is that first glorious shower after the long flight, and unpacking because I like to have all my clothes nestled into their home-time dresser and my suitcase stowed away and out of sight; I don’t want to be reminded that I will have to leave again all too soon.
The last night always comes all too soon. The days flit away, heedless of my attempts to hold them back, my mind grasping and snatching at thin air. To no avail. I count down the last few full days, their poignancy mounting as each one passes. The last trip to the mall, the last trip downtown, even the last trip to the recycling center takes on the weight of impending nostalgia.
I start to gather things that are mine. My glasses had taken up residence in the cupholder of my mother’s car, my sunglasses and my earbuds on an end-table near the door where they are easy to grab on the way out for a walk. I deposit my little presents for next-trip me: toothpaste and a new pack of toothbrush heads, pads and tampons, sometimes even a can of soup or some frozen Kind bars in the freezer (not this time, though – I just ate the last one!). I lug the suitcase back out and fill it, trying to stuff this feeling of home, familiar and safe and beloved, in among the socks and books and Reese’s candy (can’t find it in Italy), but you can’t capture it. Somewhere between the floor of my childhood bedroom and unzipping the suitcase on the other end, it evaporates and I am left hollowed out with homesickness.
I always recover from it (and, indeed, am always sad for whatever season is ending whenever I am on my way back here, be it summer in Italy or pre-Christmas festivities) but from where I sit now, in my cozy chair in my beloved childhood home with the wind swishing through the trees I’ve loved all my life, the travel day and the first few days back in Europe stretch ahead, lonely and disorienting. The last night in my cozy bed – the best bed in the whole world, I swear it! – the last morning in my cozy chair, the last hours here in this house with my beloved parents, ever more conscious that my time with them is not infinite… it’s hard.
Sometimes I wonder if it would be like this, if I hadn’t chosen this type of life, with the pins of my heart tacked firmly into several quite distant parts of the map. Would I have lived around the corner, and had so much time with my parents I wouldn’t even notice it? Would I have lived somewhere else in the US, and would weekends stolen back at home been all the more rare because of limited US vacation times? Would I somehow still have arrived at 35 and the awareness that my time with my parents is not forever, and so every dinner, every coffee, every weekend with them is precious? Or would it have taken longer? I’ll never know, of course, but I think about it sometimes. I often want to ask some of my friends who stayed in the US if they are as aware of time passing as I am. I assume so, although I must admit that twice yearly visits really highlight the passing seasons and fleeting years.
For now, I will finish my work while trying to soak in the precious sound of the wind in the trees with at least some part of my brain. I will clean up the kitchen and lovingly wipe down those counters until next time, and prepare my coffee for tomorrow morning. I will sip my coffee trying to absorb the peace and familiarity of my room and not think too much about the impending rush. Then there will be the impending rush, and eventually I will shut that door, and try to stopper my heart against the feelings of time passing and things ending, and by this time tomorrow night I will be a third of the way across the ocean, and that much closer to the other part of my life.
Well… I definitely wasn’t in the mood to do a goals check at midyear. We had just found out about my dad’s cancer, my grandmother was in the hospital again, and I was scrambling to catch up on work and prepare for exams so I could at least take one or two of the three or four I’d originally planned. However! The end of August will mark 2/3 of the year, and that’s coming up in a week or so… so really there is no actual specific date attached to this goals check, but I feel inspired to do it, so here goes!
Continue reading “Non-midyear Goals Check”
We moved into the new place officially last week (hooray!), and when the Partner loaded up our bikes on the back of his car to take them over there, I thought how we hadn’t ridden them in a while and that it was funny – at some point, we took a ride on them through the neighborhood of the old apartment, and came home and probably had a shower, and put up our helmets and propped up the bikes, and that was the last time we would ever ride around that neighborhood, but we didn’t know it.
Continue reading “The Last Time”
Forever Straniera 