education

The Clouds of a Crisis

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the clouds move in
on our long walk across town,
the bike ride’s end
tagging along my subconscious

their cacophony emanates
through slick crosswalks
and cart-pulling passersby
as we make our way into
the theatre where they will become
the stage presences
they’ve only seen in pictures

after the show my colleague announces,
heavy accent and all,
It’s raining men,
and his prim-and-proper appearance,
his paisley umbrella,
fit in a warm spot
at the bottom of my heart

i teach one class (solo today),
the chart comparing schools
in Spain to America
too dense to ever fit
within the bounds of
a chalk-dust ridden
minuscule version of education

the rides home, back out,
home, back out, cause waves
of daily inconsistency that
pour out of the sky,
bearing down on the heaviness
of my home across the sea

my country sits divided
on a fence i cannot fathom,
these moments of
familiarity and love
bursting through
the clouds of a crisis
none of my countrymen can understand

in darkness,
on rain-slick tiled side streets,
i make my final pedal,
capture your words on the screen,
and wonder when we can
relinquish the rain

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Unpredictability

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You can’t predict this. That your day will begin before dawn and end later than most people in America would consider working. Hell, in Spain, too, though they sure as hell don’t mind hiring me to work that late!

There was no way of knowing, before I came here, how much homework my daughters would have. How intimidating and complex it could be, while I sit with my translate app ready to look up the English version of words like slither, spinal, and homonym. How much time this would take out of the exceedingly brief time I have with them each day. How I could lose sleep over how early I need to set the alarm, because what if Mythili fails her science test or Riona doesn’t have a chance to read aloud to me or Isabella can’t retell the story of Jesus saving all and bringing his followers to the kingdom of heaven when she’s never heard these stories in English to compare them to??

This isn’t my singular problem. I have come up with a new theory (yet again) about Spain. Since I spend most of my day not with my family but with Spaniards, I hear all kinds of stories and details about their culture. Students commonly spend 4-5 hours a night completing homework, and parents often take classes themselves, for professional development, French, English, you name it. Not because they’re looking forward to a salary increase, mind you. Because they want to learn. Week nights are essential to their incremental increase of knowledge.

Studying and working so intensely, especially between the days of Monday through Thursday, are as much a part of this culture as sacred meal times, siesta, and family-only weekends. Yes, they may live for vacations, but they work their asses off in between times so that they can enjoy them!

So when I had a few clients tonight mention to me that next Thursday is (yet another) fiesta, and “will you be working?” I almost answered no. But I’m just too damn American. I want to say, “You do realize that if I don’t work, I don’t get paid, right? And that I have a family?” But I just tell them, “Yes, I’m working,” to which they respond with, “OK… well it is a holiday, so we’ll call you next Wednesday to let you know if we’re taking a trip or not.”

It’s almost laughable! I can’t imagine planning a trip the day before I take it! Just like I can’t imagine allowing Isabella to put off her religion homework till Sunday night, or letting Mythili get by with just a 7 on her lengua exam (that will never happen again!), or allowing Riona to skip out on circling all the letters her teacher wants her to focus on enunciating this week (though this is not required).

I couldn’t have predicted how complicated our lives would be here. The impossibility of presumptions that I could have made, most of which would have been untrue, would have made a long tail that followed me across the sea and would have been chopped slowly away with each new day. Fortunately, I was too busy giving up my previous life one heartbreak at a time before boarding that plane, so I didn’t have any time to predict anything at all. And that is why I am still able to set my alarm for the exact right minute and suck the marrow out of every brief moment of life that does not involve a frenzied cycle across town, trying to explain an overly-litigate society to Spaniards whose schools don’t have proper fire alarms, or translating food wheels for a seven-year-old. Instead, I can look forward to next week’s fiesta in Benidorm, a trip I planned weeks ago, have already booked and paid for, and beats out all predictions–impossible to make–about how intensely I would love my vacations!!

Thank You for the Lesson

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i take your words
heavy accent and all
put them in my pocket
a charm for today

they tickle my heart
almost take away the traffic noise
the hot rooms packed with pupils
and make me feel at home
make me miss my home
all in the same moment

Beautiful Little Boxes

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I have a schedule posted on the board in the English department’s office. It pretty much lists the twelve classes I will attend each week, all different levels of students ranging from ages 12-18, with correlating levels of English (seventh graders being the lowest level, twelfth graders the highest). However, since Spain has a different way of labeling students and grades, I haven’t quite memorized the various levels, nor knew, during my first week, what ages I would encounter until I entered the classrooms and asked students how old they were.

On my schedule in the English department are beautiful little boxes where the teachers can write the topic of the day. Beneath my schedule is a plastic funda, (I don’t know this word in English), where teachers can put photocopies of activities or, in most cases, of the textbooks that they make the poor students purchase, that we will be discussing that day.

This is how it should work: the day before the lesson, my beautiful little boxes should be filled with notes, copies should be underneath in the funda, and I can enter each of my twelve different subjects prepared to teach.

But let me review the teachers’ day in Spain. Yesterday I think it was 98 degrees (haven’t quite learned Centigrade yet, but I’m guessing over 40). Please note: no air conditioning. Students remain in the same room, together, all day, waiting for various teachers to filter in from all over the building, a pile of books and chalk in hand. Each teacher has at least three preps, usually five, and the schedule for all varies from day to day. There is not one moment of consistency. You cannot expect to go in and teach level one English during period two, five days a week. It will be three times a week, and the time changes depending on the day. Hopefully you can appear in the correct classroom at the correct time with the correct materials. So far, I have not succeeded in doing so.

I have not a qualm in the world then, when I return home and tell Bruce about my day, and he replies with, They are taking advantage of you because you showed them that you’re too good in the beginning, and I shoot back with, You have no idea what it’s like for them.

Today I had a plan for one of three classes, as one teacher put her copies in the funda and wrote her topic in my beautiful little box. I attended the bilingual meeting, where I was again reminded that I do not speak nor understand Spanish, other than when the music teacher (my new favorite person) spoke in a clear, slow, perfectly-understandable accent. I heard bits and pieces of conversations, and one somewhat heated debate involving menus, prices, and places to eat, having to do with, perhaps, everyone getting together on November 9? My goal for the end of the year: to know what happens during these weekly meetings!

I attended the first, prepared-for class. The teacher wanted me to run the entire show, beginning to end, and I felt confident that I at last understood my job. I am the only one who speaks English with perfect authority, and I only have these students once per week. They need to hear the native speaker. No matter what it is I have to say. But more importantly, the teachers? God do they need a break!!! We learned about multiculturalism in Britain after a brief lecture by me (while the teacher ran an errand) about the letters being the same in the words SILENT and LISTEN… high schoolers… ugh…

Moving on to the next class, I appeared on time, before the teacher, of course. She came in and saw the math scribbles on the board and asked me if I needed chalk, holding up the two tiny stubs of chalk that remained below the chalkboard. (Might I remind everyone that there are no overhead projectors, not even the transparency type??) Sure… I replied… what might we be doing today? (She hadn’t filled my beautiful little box, so I hadn’t the slightest idea, though I was immediately relieved to see a group of middle-school-aged kids, my home). All About Britain, she replied, and when I asked if they’d already started to read the book, she didn’t understand me. We switched to Spanish, but let me tell you. I may have trouble understanding Spanish, but at least I don’t claim to be a Spanish teacher, God forbid!

Luckily for me, this appeared the be the same lesson that was minutes-before thrust on me on Monday with a different teacher, so I perfected it quite nicely today, thank you very much! (I decided to omit his absurd terminating requirement of having one student at a time read aloud a sentence in English and translate, for the whole class, the Spanish equivalent… translation truly just doesn’t work most of the time). The teacher today? She sat in the back of the room fanning herself and not saying a word. Total trust after less than a week? I’ll take it.

On to lesson three, where I received the most beautiful gift of all time. First, there’s a fifteen-minute break for everyone in the school before the last period of the day! Second, I’d made questions for this particular text one day while sitting on the beach, and had printed them for the teacher, who, surprise surprise, never had time to make copies. I guess you will have to write them on the board then she told me… I stared at my palms, whose chalk dust I had just washed off in the bathroom. I suppose so… I admitted, crestfallen. But when we walked down to her room, voila! Smartboard, projector, computer. Do you have this room every week, for this class? I asked, more excited than a kid just arriving at Disney World. It was about the best gift I could imagine receiving. I pulled out my flash drive, asked the tallest boy in the class (high schoolers again??) to reach up to the ceiling and turn on the projector, and I felt like a real teacher again! I could type! Change fonts! Add colors!! Use a pointer, highlight, underline, everything I feel like every student needs, but ESPECIALLY second language students. How lucky the teacher is, in a room that has such a beautiful gift, one whose description would never fit into a beautiful little box, because words could never fit the gratitude that filled every moment of that oh-so-perfect American lesson.

Before I left for the day, I checked my schedule again. Someone had scribbled in, All About Britain, in the box for today (a little after the fact, I think). I also had a note on my desk from a teacher saying he wouldn’t be in the class I share with him tomorrow, but could I do the same lesson as Monday? (Well, the cultural liaison explained, Since everyone realized right away that you are an actual teacher, not like these teacher assistants we’ve had in the past, we have great trust in you…It’s up to you, though, if you want to do that…)

I couldn’t explain to her, in English or Spanish, what I do, what I have done, for the past seven years. I couldn’t explain it this morning in the meeting when the history teacher asked me if I knew anything about American history and I tried to say, in front of all, in my broken Spanish, that I co-taught that subject for seven years. I couldn’t explain to my colleagues back home what it is like to be a teacher in Spain. All I can do is be the best teacher I know how to be, to fit myself into a beautiful little box, and hope that when the box is opened, the students on the other side will see the world in a different way.

Direct Translation

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I set my alarm for just after 8. It is almost laughable. 8!! I used to get up at 4:16. It is surreal to me now, not even in the realm of possibility. I need to finish grading these papers on Saturday morning (the real morning, not the Spaniard version) before we pick up our “free” weekend car.

The girls pop out of their rooms just after 9 (how I love these Persian blinds that block out all light). I am not finished yet, and they meander in and out of the living room eating Nutella-ridden bread, crumbs dripping onto the couch we’ll never be able to vacuum. Such a simple idea, isn’t it? A vacuum?

My world back home is seven hours away from waking, and I put sloppy grades on a few last papers for the job they pay me next to nothing for while they send emails about their latest advertising campaign and take money from the federal government to finance loans for students who will neither graduate nor pay them back, but that’s OK. Thank you, Phoenix, for funding the 54€ in gas, the uniforms that cost more than they’re worth at Corte Inglés, the place that wouldn’t take my American credit card when everywhere else it works just fine? The store that doesn’t have adjustable waist bands for my too-skinny girls, that doesn’t offer hangers but includes a post office, a ferreteria, a price that doubles for the same exact brand, same exact fucking skirt, so be sure you’re paying attention or you’ll get screwed? Oh… yes. THIS must be the store my Spaniards were talking about when they said clothes were expensive in Spain. I mean, Pepe Jeans and DKNY for toddlers???

But I digress. What is the point of this post? Ahh, yes. My suitcase. My bicycle. The items I paid a pretty penny for, the things I brought from America that I either regret or am forever thankful for. (Duh, the bike is on the forever thankful for list).

Why did I bring soap? Sweaters? Endless pairs of pants? Will I ever see anything but summer? We spent the day in our “free” car at the beach on October 6th!! Am I ever going to pull onto my legs the seven pairs of pants, the fall-to-the-floor skirts, the winter coat whose presence in my wardrobe is nothing but a harsh reminder of the snow in Denver that people keep posting about today?

Why did I not bring what I would need? Books for my girls. My LCD projector. My electric teapot. A driver’s license that works anywhere in the world? (oops… impossible) And today? Monistat.

To tag onto my realm of reality, yesterday’s post: Wal-mart, I miss you. Your $5.97 price for a three-day cure, your place on the shelf in the pharmacy section (holy fuck, I almost started typing that with an F! Spanglish is destroying my mind!!)

But no. It’s OK, I can do this. I can walk the two blocks to the Farmacia, green cross flashing almost every hour of the day (not Sunday, nor between 3-6, of course!!). I have iPhone translator ready! Am prepared to look for what it tells me. The phrase is memorized before I enter the tiny store, where I’m inundated with condoms, sex creams, and baby bottles, multivitamins for toddlers, all in the same section, of course. After a quick review of the this-is-no-Walgreens store, I face the facts: it’s going up to the counter or suffering weeks with an uncomfortable itch.

Wow. This blog is getting brutal.

It’s so simple, really! The phrase! Levadura crema anti hongos. She is young, just out of college, in her pretty white coat.”For your feet, or for your body?”

Shit. I’m screwed. There’s a possibility she thinks I have Athlete’s Foot. “Body!” I almost shout. (Do we need to specify which part?) She goes to the back and emerges with a small box of cream. Begins to announce the topical use on all parts of the body, and I hold my hand up. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think this is it. I need… I don’t know how to say it.” Some fast fingers later, Mr. iPhone translator fucks me over again. Is there no word for yeast in Spanish???

I type in yeast infection and all I get is a translation that basically says, infection of the cream to cure the infection?? I show her the screen, feeling sheepish. (It is only hours later, examining the Spanish directions for the cream, that I remember the Latin root, Candidas. Yay for etymology that doesn’t come through in moments of trepidation!). “Su traducción…” she begins, and, as I do as an ESL teacher, as I do every day in Spain, I think of a simpler way to say it. I type in vaginal infection, and… of course!! It comes right up, a direct translation, same fucking words and all??? “Infección vaginal?” Wow.

A grin on her face as she examines the screen I hold up in front of her, she pops in and out of the back, and I have two weeks of torture in front of me, no sex, no simple cure, no pulling off the shelf in Wal-mart my one night stand, my freedom handed over in less than six dollars. But at least I can say that I faced my fear, walked into the pharmacy, and translated all my doubts via iPhone into the everyday reality of my life. I am lost in translation, out for the count, ready to cash in my chips for all I didn’t pack, all the money I have taken advantage of for so long, that is now poured into the Spanish economy like blood bringing new life to a newborn, one I hold within my arms and nurse as I think of a new beginning to my life in this home that is my home and not my home.

Dear America: Love Your School!!

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You are so lucky!! I have always known this, and tried not to take advantage of your wealth. I mean it. We don’t have all the typical luxuries that many Americans have, especially in the past 9.5 years of having children and only one salary to support them, one TEACHER’S salary. But still. Now that I’ve been here, I realize day in and day out how SPOILED we are. We have a huge home with a huge yard, two cars, the ability to go anywhere at any time, and jobs that ROCK!

Let me tell you about what it’s like to be a teacher in Spain. To be a student in Spain. You will have, more or less, the same hours as in America. But the similarities end there. Students, you have to buy, and carry across town, all your textbooks. Your parents will put forward 300€-400€ every year just for this. Teachers, you can say goodbye to the dream of having your own classroom. You’ll move around all day, toting books and supplies, to white-walled, un-air-conditioned, packed-to-the-gills classrooms with teenage body odors seeping into every moment. And just when you thought you could make an amazing presentation to your students on the first day of school with the PowerPoint you spent hours preparing, filled with special effects and links to important sites crucial for their understanding? Sorry! There is not a computer here. Not a projector. Not even an old-fashioned, transparency-laden, ten-years-back projector, nor a screen! (Don’t even MENTION a document camera, please, or I might die!) A whiteboard? Please, a whiteboard? Of course not! Everyone loves the feeling of dry chalk dust on their palms for the rest of the dashing-through-hallways day! (Just in case you were under the impression that you could tote your Mac and projector from America and use Wifi to access everything you ever needed–God forbid you have such an idea!–I might add that Wifi pretty much doesn’t exist here, and if it “does” it’s a lie, sham, scam, and disappointment, because you might wait five minutes for one page to open!)

A couple of hours will pass, and it feels like it ought to be lunch time. A siren announces that it’s… not lunch time. Oh, I’m sorry, your parents can’t afford to feed you? Sucks to be you, no free-and-reduced lunch forms to fill out here! No cafeteria! Perhaps your parents packed you some pan and you can wander around the school for thirty minutes counting down till your main meal at 3:30, after the last bell.

If you’re a student and you need special services, such as, um, Spanish as a second language? Special education? A teacher might just come and pull you out of class every day with a small group of other students, a mixture of all types of needs, and you will neither know why nor have a single phone call or form sent home to your parents.

I know what you’re thinking, America. Sounds a lot easier, doesn’t it? There’s no stress about decorating classrooms, arranging desks in a special way, filling out paperwork and attending IEP/ELLP/MEETINGS! But come on! Just try it for one day, and you will be forever grateful for what you may have thought was a desperate situation, a no-respect, get-me-out-of-this-profession situation. Trust me. One day in a Spanish school, and you will learn to LOVE your job, your board of education, your rights, your Americanism!!

And that, over everything, I think, is why I’m here. 🙂

Peppered

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For Jana Clark

you are still in your same house
(i have the address memorized)
my favorite neighborhood,
across the sea from me now.
you lived there then,
the Septembers of my youth,
peppered with your words
that ask me now to write a memory

i could write about the time when
in one weekend warm weather withered
into a bitterly cold fall,
my first year of college
one heartbreak crashing into another,
the Labor Day break just a reminder
that warmth no longer existed

or back in the day,
my naivete governing all thoughts,
i believed i was becoming a woman,
my ache for belonging too great a need
as i gave myself to him
(thinking the whole time
i need to tell my best friend,
the sharing of the news
more meaningful than the milestone)

but none of these match up,
they can’t quite compare
to the memories i make today,
four weeks after you stood beside me in the bar
and begged me to cast my ballot

i am in a new dimension of reality
where Romans and Carthagenians
march across town in handmade
togas, swords, and shields,
peppered with brightly lit rides
and rebuilt Rome, chock full
of every marisco you never quite knew

my September to remember,
no falling leaves,
no fall festival,
just skinned rabbits in the grocer,
fresh bread on every corner,
and your words peppered
in the background of all i do,
of all i am, all these years
and miles later.

My Grandmother’s Stories

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My daughter, Mythili, has come home from school for two days with tears streaming down her face. She has locked herself in her room, needing a while to adjust to what the afternoon, and its homely comforts, could offer her. Yesterday she cried because she wasn’t returning the homework due, and her teacher stood outside of the school and told me that she needed to bring it, and that she didn’t seem particularly happy at the school, though he’d seen her sisters adjusting quite well. Today, it was his insistence on her using cursive for writing out her numbers, a form of writing that is foreign to her. Kind of like the language that is foreign to her.

We are in Spain. I have picked up my family and moved in the opposite direction of progress, to a country with a 20% unemployment rate and a government that can’t decide what to do with itself. Mythili, like me, is struggling with understanding all that is asked of her, and just like I couldn’t get the phone line installed when I wanted, she didn’t know when to turn in her homework.

These moments that I have omitted from my Facebook posts, that I have mostly kept quiet, these are the moments that I think about my grandmother’s story. She told it to me more than once, a bright line from Heaven shining down on her faith, her childhood, her way of looking at this world.

There are so many things that I could write about my grandmother. It could begin with the two weeks we used to spend with her every summer, where she’d take us to the beach (we all had to carry a chair and a towel, to take turns holding handles of the cooler), to the bargain shops to pick out new outfits for school, to church where she would pray and introduce us to her priest, to the small pond in Bethany where we swam and played on the playground. Those visits were the highlight of my childhood summers, and as an adult, when I planned visits, she still did everything in her power to make it special, calling me a week in advance to ask what meal she should prepare, asking me what show in New York we should go see, driving across states to visit Bob or Willow.

But it is the childhood stories, the ones she told me on long road trips or train rides, that I will remember most distinctly. To this day, I cannot allow my children to carry a spoon, a stick, a straw, or anything in their mouths as they walk around, for pure fear of what might happen to them as my grandmother reiterated many times the tragic loss of her twenty-one-month-old baby sister, who died from an infection in her throat after tripping with a lollipop stick in her mouth. The time when she went with her father, at age nine, to go look for an apartment across town because her mother was so heartbroken over losing her baby that she couldn’t live there any more. I can still hear my grandmother’s voice: “I looked out the window of the apartment down below. There was an empty lot. And a little boy was taking his car and making tracks in the dirt. He looked up for just a moment and waved at me… that was the first time I saw your grandfather.”

The story that stands out the most for me I have replayed in my mind many times over the past five months. In a period of two days, I found out that I was accepted into a teaching program in Spain, that my grandmother was entering hospice care, and that I would have to quit the job that I loved so much rather than taking a leave of absence.

I kept thinking about my grandmother’s childhood journey, and the one of her mother before her, coming to a country she’d never seen. My grandmother told me that when she came back to the United States at age eight, even though she’d been born in America, she only spoke Italian. She had much difficulty understanding English in school. All the kids at school picked on her and called her a guinea. She talked about how her father, “in his broken English,” went down to the school and told the teachers that they needed to help her, but that no one would help her.

At her wit’s end, she went to church. She knelt on a pew and prayed to God to help her, to help her learn English so that she could be a part of her new country, so that she could be educated. She prayed and cried, and soon a nice Irish woman came over to her and asked her what was wrong. She tried to explain, and the woman took her in, helped her learn English, introduced her to the man that she would one day marry. “And I knew,” she told me, “I knew that God had heard me, and that God was looking out for me.”

I will never forget those words and what the story meant to my grandmother. Her experiences, her stories, have trickled down four generations, and I feel my family living a life very similar to hers now. All along this arduous journey of sacrifice I have made to bring my family to Spain and fulfill a lifelong dream, I have thought about what my grandmother would have told me to do. And what my grandmother’s parents did; the risks they took.

So when I see my daughter step into her room and cry because she is so frustrated, because she doesn’t quite fit in, because everyone in her class knows her name though she knows none of theirs (“Why do they know your name?” “Because they talk about me all the time since I’m American,” she replies), I think about my grandmother. I think about her story, about her struggles growing up in the Depression, and then moving on to a better life, raising the four children she loved so much, doting on the seven grandchildren whose visits she cherished.

I will always remember our visits. The memories will dance like a filmstrip through my mind, sweet and melodic. But it is her words, her stories, that will trickle down and make me, and all the generations her soul has touched, the people that we were meant to be.

By My Side

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Yes, this is surreal to me. For how long have I pictured my life like this, my family in a situation that is both wholly unique and someone daunting with each moment? Doubt, like the Queen’s Guards, has stood stolidly by my side from the moment I accepted this position. Now it hovers only lightly, more of an irritating mosquito buzzing about my ears at night, continuously waking me and yet impossible to find, to squash. I am here, and things are going well, better than I could have dreamed, with tutoring positions so easy to find that I am at the point of working well into the night (“You know, we Spaniards like to go to bed at twelve or one”) or having to turn people away. So we’re safe, secure, in a better position than we have been in months. We can stop the ticking on our credit card bill, pay for the necessities of life, perhaps even have a bit extra for a weekend trip to Barcelona or a day trip in a rental car to the beach.

It’s the small things, the GIANT small things, that get in the way. My girls’ school, my last choice, with the bars on the windows, the gate that keeps out outsiders, my oldest getting top scores in science and math on day four in a country where the language isn’t her native tongue?? The looks that cross others’ faces when I say the name of the school. When I tell them the part of town we live in. Irony is my best friend. After nine years of teaching ESL to poor immigrants who can’t afford to live in a nice neighborhood, own a car, or go to the best school, I am now one of those poor immigrants. I walk with the “Moors” (as they DO call them here) to the school. I try to argue with the Spaniards about Arabic/Mideastern students I’ve had in the States, how respectful they are, how dedicated to their studies. But no, not these, they respond. These people are poor, uneducated, don’t know Spanish, making the whole school have to dumb everything down… Boy have I heard that one before. Sounds a little like the world works the same no matter where you go. But what, at this point, can I do? Am I putting my girls in a bad situation where they will lose a year of good education? Should I still search for a different school and then lay down another exorbitant stash of cash on books I cannot afford?

Then remorse creeps up… I think about my last month at home, my sheer panic of unemployment, my frantic search for online jobs… that I wasted, all for naught. All the things I could have been doing, the people I could have spent my time with… sometimes I let my inherent sense of responsibility and control get the best of me. But then I play devil’s advocate for myself when I think, I did this to my family, and I had to find a way to make it work… I just wish I could have seen into the future, to know that things would be OK. I didn’t realize I’d be about the only American to step into this city where no one has even HEARD of Colorado, and are all in love with the idea of having an American teach them English!

And fear, fear stands by my side even as I walk around a new block, take in the view of a new apartment building that faces the mountains, see a new beauty I didn’t see the day before… fear is always there. Who is here to be at our back, to look out for us when we’re sad, to catch us when we’re ready to fall? We have done this almost wholly on our own from day one, and it hasn’t been easy. With me being the only one able to communicate, and my Spanish being nowhere near the level it needs to be to complete the most important tasks of setting up a home and getting my children properly educated, I fear what will come next as new challenges creep up. How alone will we find ourselves as time goes on?

I have so many emotions standing by my side, hovering around me as I face the world with the happiness and relief that are also there. All I can hope, as I go through each day, is that the exuberance, the surrealism, will never wear off, that I can pounce out my doubt, remorse, and fear and make this into the dream it was meant to be.

In Four Days

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sun shined on every moment
as we walked along the beach
(when life was not a beach)
money and bus schedules
weighing us under water

oblivious,
our girls swam all day,
mermaid Barbies in tow,
searching for seashells

when in one week we were filled
with a box full of activity
registering ourselves as residents
registering our girls for school
registering for a new life

this week we worked a different tack
searching for a new response
to a computer without Internet
phone conversations i couldn’t interpret
and hope for something better

in four days,
the sun sparkling on travertine tile,
the sun sparkling on long walks
between lorikeets
and Roman architecture,
we have moved from survivors
to healthily employed,
dream-fulfilled,
satisfied Spaniards!!