Stalking

The few weeks that I have been in the USA alone have been a little tough despite the warm welcome of friends here.

Before I left Portugal, Anne suggested that we get a couple of cameras, partly for animal activity and partly as extra security.  In the USA we had been using a platform that has a base station that the cameras connect to and a monthly subscription.  I was not too keen to use something with a monthly recurring fee so I settled on a camera company that has SD cards and a mobile phone app with an optional monthly subscription if you feel you need to store information for later retrieval online.

So it was that my phone in the USA kept on pinging me when there was movement in the front or back of our house and I would regularly open the phone app and see Anne or Nick hanging out on the front porch. Once or twice I said something to them through the camera but more often, I'd send them a WhatsApp message to tell them that I was snooping.

In my last post I was so focused on talking about being hosted by people we'd met and befriended in America that I forgot to mention some old friends!

In 1999 we had decided that I'd look for work outside of South Africa and we had a couple of friends who had gone to America to work in the booming information technology industry during the dot com bubble.  One family who we'd known for years in Grahamstown and who's children and ours built an elaborate fantasy that they were cousins, had moved to America and offered to host me at their house for an exploratory trip.

In 2000 I planned to go first to England and then to America on a scouting trip.  Our friend in England was away for a conference once the dates were finalized so I switched the plan to start in America.  Before I left home I used a facility on one of our servers to send an email set to arrive while I was in the air.  At the time this was a trick that was not known outside of tech circles so was utterly unexpected.   The email said goodbye, and made some promises about a different future.  I discovered with some horror that this email coming over the ether from me freaked her out.  Suddenly the sweet message played out as somewhat sinister message saying goodbye to the living and reassuring her that despite this, her future would be different now.

My hosts in America treated me to tours, road trips and a ride up to meet a climber who knew a mutual friend of theirs.  It was on one of these climbing outings that I learned about a company that was looking for someone fitting my background.  It was also not the first time that "Rhodes University" in my resume was interpreted as "he was a Rhodes Scholar".  Technically I suppose I am a scholar from Rhodes, but I only learned quite a lot later that this false conclusion had helped to cement my credentials at the time.  

Anne had a similar experience with an item in her resume that listed her as having taught in East London.  It was on the morning of the day that she was introduced to the school that she realized, as the headmaster proudly announced that she had taught in East London, that he had assumed it was London, England!

We have had a standing tradition of a Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) lunch with these South African friends since we came over to America so our more recent visits have been a little sad given the distance to travel for a meal like that.  They also have the distinction of being friends that we have jokingly alternately blamed and then thanked for encouraging us to come to America in the first place.

I was able to take a trip down to Raleigh to visit a couple we grew close to over the first ten years in Boston.  I had worked with the husband at my first job.  He and his wife adopted a daughter who become our adopted niece.  She was a the subject of many of my attempts at child portraits before they moved down to Raleigh and is in her early teens now.  I was honored that she agreed to allow me to take a photograph of her while I was there.  Anne will no doubt use one of them as a reference for a new drawing of her.  I really enjoyed hanging out with them and experiencing the warmth of their company.

Their daughter has inherited her dad's sense of humor.  I told her the story of the fairy house and asked her if she thought the fairies would find the house that our granddaughter built for them and move in?  She said:

"Yes, they'll find it.  And they'll get you!"

After I officially retired at the end of April I have been going through these bittersweet steps to transition from full time work.  I have made myself available for some consulting to smooth the process of my exit so I expect to have increasing time at my disposal in the coming weeks to get started on the few projects that are lined up.

Last all-hands send off

I told a colleague that my daily routine would probably involve carting some wheelbarrow loads of stone from the yard, fiddling with technology to get our gates working again, setting up graphs to show the temperature trends in our hot water system and reading.  When I told Anne what I had said, she reminded me that I have a lot to catch up on in the cooking department so I guess there is that too.

My last stop was at Yale where Matt graduated on Monday.  He has a Masters in Nursing Science which makes him a registered nurse and a nurse practitioner, a career in the USA (and perhaps elsewhere) which allows him to consult with patients and prescribe medicine.  It is a role that is somewhere between a nurse and a doctor.  He specialized in Family Medicine (General Practice) and he will start a residency in Seattle in the fall at an outpatient community clinic.

The Yale campus is truly beautiful and I was proud to be able to go there and be with him for his graduation.

My flight back to our new home leaves in a few minutes and I won't be putting an email up to be triggered while I am flying over the Atlantic, though mostly because in all likelihood I'll have wifi and be able to message from my seat way up in the air.

I have one more month on my tourist visa to the EU after which I have to leave.  I'll have fingers crossed and be holding thumbs that my visa approval for the residence permit is approved in time for me to return to the USA, pick it up and head back home at the end of the first week of July.

News from Home

It has been weird not having a constant companion. 

We have incredibly generous and dear friends in the USA.  For the most part we have used Trusted Housesitters and AirBnb to find places to stay in Europe, England and here in the USA.  But some friends insisted that we stay with them each time we returned to the USA.  Mary, our first American friend, with her little King Charles Spaniel welcomed us and also took the “trusted house sitter” lead to have us mind her house and dog on a couple of trips that she took while we were there.  

Getting soft-serves in Swampscott with Mary

Our first (new) South African friends in America made their home and one of their cars available to us on multiple visits (including accepting our offer for some pet sitting on one occasion).  Other friends have offered to have us stay once they learned how we have been making our way since we sold our house.

I'm particularly sensitive to not imposing on people.  It's a delicate balance, because we are very aware that no matter how "chill" we are as guests, we are still there.all.the.time during our stay and it does make a difference in the house.  So we have kept our stay-overs (even with these close friends) to one to two weeks where possible.  We have promised to reciprocate when they visit us in Portugal, which we hope will be soon.

I am heading to Raleigh to see our friends there on my third week of this trip. They have a daughter who came into our lives in 2010 when I became her honorary uncle and portrait photographer until they left for Raleigh in 2015.  We haven’t been able to see them all since before 2020.  I’ll spend a week with them catching up before coming back to New England for our son Matt’s graduation at Yale a few days before my return trip to Portugal.

Anne had a "Mission Impossible" moment or two back in Portugal on the second week after I left. 

She had to take a trip to a city in the far North West, called Braga - a five hour drive to her appointment with immigration officials in Braga.  She learned on the weekend before they left that the furniture was going to arrive on the same day.  

She was able to move the furniture arrival to the day after they returned and she and Nick were able to enjoy their visit to what turned out to be an absolutely beautiful city which they both loved.

We had heard that the weather up there is pretty cold and wet in the winter - similar to English winters, so we had not visited it when we did our tour of Portugal in the months that we had been there in 2023.

After an exhausting drive back and not too much sleep she awoke to two men from Spain (neither of them young) arriving in a big truck to unload our storage stuff.  In Boston, 5 men had loaded the truck and it seemed absurd that only two older men should have to do this huge job. 

The truck driver decided that our street and the corner into our street was too narrow for their large truck despite the evidence we had in realty photos that a 40ft container had been parked outside our house before.  So they used a smaller van to shuttle between the large truck on a feeder road and our house for about 6 hours, unloading stuff that I know from residual pain in my back are very heavy.

I'm somewhat relieved that I was thousands of miles away - I suspect I would have been inclined to try to help them.  I joked with a colleague whose son had done some of the work helping me loading that we might be willing to pay him to fly to Portugal to help out.  The notion definitely appealed to his son I learned the next day.

Naturally the days following were filled with nostalgia as Anne started sorting through the boxes and unpacking things.  I really would have liked to be there because this is the part where the empty house becomes a home.

At our house near Boston we had found a hollow at the bottom of a pine tree that was just the right size for a fairy house.  We put furniture in it and found a little fairy door  for the opening.  Our grandchildren were enchanted by it and used to leave little notes for the fairies - the last of which was something along the lines of "dear fairies, granny and grandpa are leaving and going to another country.  I hope that you can find them when they find their new home and come to live with them".  

One of our granddaughters went to a ceramic class with Anne and made a  house of clay for the fairies to move into when we did find a new home.

Anne sent me a photo of the little house placed at the foot of our juvenile lemon tree.  

Anne asked me if I thought the fairies would find the house and come over and I said: "Never".  I hope that I'm wrong because the little girls might be disappointed if a pair of mice take up residence instead.

Before I left, we hung two swallows, which Jess had given us as a housewarming present, on the wall in front of the house, following a tradition in Portugal. We had learned that they are a much loved symbol representing love, loyalty, hope, and new beginnings which are all very appropriate.  They also mate for life.   

Next to the swallows is our happy gargoyle face that we have had hanging outside our homes since our daughters were little and Anne has added an elephant sculpture, another thoughtful gift from a friend,  showing her love for these majestic beasts.  

The house trim is now turquoise instead of dark grey.

In the meantime I retired from my job and started gathering all the remaining paperwork for the Portuguese residence permit, which included an FBI criminal check.  I'm not sure why there is anxiety involved in this process.  They take electronic fingerprints and your details and run them through their criminal database to see if there are any matches.  Despite never having been near to any crime or crime scene the moments between submitting them and the email where they tell you that you are not a criminal are filled with anxiety!  Luckily it takes less than thirty minutes to get the results emailed to you so it is more or less like begin pulled over by a cop and then allowed to drive on because your driver’s license shows you live in the same town as the cop.

Anne has this great attribute where she will reinvent how she thinks of ongoing experiences to make them positive, particularly if she has to live with them. She would often say to the children, "Change the picture in your head".

I remember years ago her saying something, like "the crickets are loud today".  I looked at her and said, "what crickets".

"Can't you hear them?"
"Nope... where are they?"

It turns out that Anne has tinnitus and because she decided that the sound was crickets, she has been experiencing these sounds as the somewhat pleasant, ubiquitous night sounds of Africa. 

So she told me one morning recently that the wind had sprung up one night as she was getting ready for bed.  Keenly aware of how the banging of the storm shutters had alarmed me when I was there alone, she carefully battened them down and got into bed only to be jarred by a loud whistling sound - like the movie sound effects of high winds in a storm.

In her sleepy mind these were the sounds of the wind whistling in our electricity lines along the side of our house.  She started thinking: "oh crap, this is something new that we are going to have to live with and its awful!"

And then as she lay there she decided that the wind was singing to her and she drifted off to sleep, feeling a little better about having to live with this sound in wind storms in the future.

The next morning when she went to open the storm shutters she noticed that the window was not properly closed and as she opened it fully the sound went away.

I think I said before that I've been waiting suspiciously to discover some bad thing about our house that the seller never revealed, so it is always a great relief when something that seems like a contender for this horror ends up being really easy to deal with.

Anne had an interaction with a grumpy man at the gas station where she stopped to fill the car and check the tires.  There is a machine the size of a petrol pump there with two more or less identical hoses on it and a sign: "Ar/Agua".  She grabbed one of the hoses and as she was about to apply it to the tire an old man behind her hooted and started shouting something unintelligible in Portuguese.  She stopped and looked at him and went back to the task at hand.  

So he got out and came over and said to her saying in English this time: "that is water that you are about to put in your tire, you need to use the other hose!"  He was trying to be helpful and was not grumpy at all.

My appointment at the Portuguese consulate went smoothly except that, because some of my documentation mentioned Anne, the official asked for our marriage certificate.  Anne was able to scan and email it before my appointment with them was over.  The official was the same one who had handled Anne's application and she said with a smile that she remembered Anne well - so we were off to a good start from the begining.  Anne was touched at the compliments she paid her about her appearance on that day.

Sorted and labeled documents for the residence application

I will have to make one more trip to America to collect the temporary visa late in June but I’m heading back to Portugal in two weeks where I expect I’m going to be hanging paintings and photographs, putting my own stamp on the home-making process.