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.