The Ides of April

A short spring is quickly being chased out of town by the rapid onset of summer– it’s in the high 80s this weekend, hard to believe considering it was only (Orthodox) Easter last weekend. After a week-long spell of Saharan dust (which apparently extended all the way west to Crete and north to Sochi), we had a few days of spectacular spring weather. Last weekend was hot, then punctuated by a day and half of heavy rain, and now we’re back to hot. It’s still slightly cool in the evenings, but at the rate we are going it’s not going to last long at all. The days are getting longer; I had forgotten how much I love to be out in the summer light at the barn. It reminds me of many happy summer evenings spent there; people linger longer with the extra hours of sun and nicer weather. It makes me sad to know we’re leaving before summer will really kick into full gear…but on the bright side, we will be leaving before summer kicks into full gear.

This tour has been the first time in a long time I’ve had friends to whom my lifestyle is completely foreign. In Ecuador, in Washington, among our friends moving and leaving was a fact of life, and not a particularly unusual one. Among Foreign Service types, it’s never really goodbye, anyway– just two months ago I saw my old boss from Ecuador at a conference in Stockholm. And I saw her when she came back from Ecuador in Washington. In fact, I’ve seen just about everyone I’ve cared to see from Ecuador since leaving. But leaving my “barn peeps” is different– their lives are here, and there’s no guarantee our lives will ever intersect again. I hope they do, and I hope we can make that happen, but it’s a fact of life that they very well could not. Cyprus is not exactly on the beaten path. I try not to think about the inevitable– although we talk about with increasing frequency at the barn. I will catch my lip quivering and force myself to take a deep breath. I try to let myself live in denial sometimes, and avoid talking about it or acknowledging itself, just so I can keep enjoying the present. I am meditating more.  Those are the good moments. Then there are the moments like this one, when I am feeling all the feels, and crying basically uncontrollably. When that happens, I just try to let myself cry and not fight the feelings so much. I remind myself I am lucky to have loved this place and these people (and these horses) enough to feel such sadness at leaving them. I am (mostly) resigned to our fate. This was never going to last forever. But nothing in life does, anyway, I suppose, so might as well have Uncle Sam around to give you a good push and shove out the door.

In the meantime, I throw myself at the things I can control:  checking the easy stuff off my to-do lists. Cleaning out my email inboxes from work. Framing our art from Egypt and elsewhere. Bagging up the glass recycling so we can dump it in the nearest receptacle, since the city won’t take glass recycling from the curbside. Shuffling piles around the house of things to donate, things to toss. Trying to figure out how we will downsize from a 3 BR/2.5 BA house with a den into a tiny 1BR/1 BA apartment. I haven’t had caffeine (aside from a Coke Zero and maybe one or two coffees) since November, to help keep the anxiety and restlessness at bay. I enjoy the occasional (ok, frequent) Franklin & Sons soda– Strawberry, Raspberry, and Black Pepper or Elderflower Lemonade– they are indulgent and delicious, I’m not sure why they haven’t found their way to the U.S. market yet.

Sometimes, I catch myself thinking wistfully about what a great adventure this lifestyle is, and how fortunate we are to live it. I’m getting better at this moving thing, more open-minded, more adaptable. And I think about all the places left to see in the world and how one lifetime will never be enough to see it all, especially just taking one major vacation a year the way most traditional families do. But then the pendulum swings the other way and I think, I would never need to travel anywhere again ever if we just had a hobby farm somewhere with a vegetable garden and couple of sport horses, goats, chickens, and dogs. Who knows at this point which life we’ll end up having…but I always go back to a wonderful quote from The Hours where Meryl Streep’s character was reflecting late in her life how she was actually happiest when life was all potential and no path dependence. So really, our present uncertainty is a gift that we should embrace…perhaps that will be my new mantra.

And with that philosophical interlude and my now dried tears, we’ll return back to our regularly scheduled Egypt programming…I still haven’t blogged about Romania, Stockholm, Warsaw, or Tbilisi yet…not to mention several local trips around Cyprus!