Settling In
It’s lovely that many people have asked how our Edinburgh adventure is going. It’s so much… hard to sum up in a text. It’s making me take this blog thing a bit more seriously!
I’m writing this In the evening with Charlie (cat #2) curled up in my lap, Karen Dalton on the Sonos, a glass of wine to hand. In other words, it feels like home. Nearly 4 weeks in, Seattle feels like a distant dream, and even quarantine feels like a short blip on the radar. I’ve sorted out the car and insurance, learned how to drive on the left (no arrests yet!), set up bank accounts and grocery deliveries, and nested fully with new rugs, etc. I’ve seen sheep, finished a bottle of whisky, figured out the induction hob, and been to nearly every bookshop in the city. I’ve switched from drip coffee to espresso (the norm here), learnt my British phone number, had Mum over for dinner, and watched the cats make themselves quite at home. But no, I have not yet used the word ‘jolly’ :-)
I feel fully awake and alive, which is a welcome change from our months of Groundhog Day. Although I spent many summers and part of college here, it’s all still wonderfully new. The grocery store, with its dizzying ‘biscuits and confectionery’ aisle, is a wonder. The crosswalks are different (painfully easy to look to the left from habit and be squashed by a double-decker bus). I can’t understand half of the morning ‘chat’ on BBC Scotland. People use WhatsApp instead of texting. And so- every minute is absorbing, learning, adding on. I needed that more than I knew.
A has settled into school brilliantly. She’s a different child- leaps out of the car in the morning and comes home beaming every night. I think she needed time with other kids, mental challenges, regular exercise. She’s excelling in math(s) and French, liking field hockey, and in week 2 was the lead debater in the school-wide debate. It’s gratifying to see her thriving like this; I don’t think I realized how upside-down her world was before. I also didn’t realize how shoddy her U.S. public education was :-( Needless to say, it makes it all worth it, and it’ll be hard to go back.
It’s not all rosy. We’re working a lot, which is a bummer. There’s no clear line between ‘work’ and ‘not work’ when you’re 8 hours away from your office in time and space. It’s harder than I thought to be in meetings til midnight, although I love having some daytime free to explore. Sigh. It’s worth it (see above paragraph).
I miss my friends. I’m used to being in a different time zone because of my mum, but didn’t realize how hard it would be to stay in touch. I’m not yet part of the fabric here (moving during Covid is hard!), so there’s not much to fill that space. I’m an extrovert, but thankfully the last 8 months have made me more of a homebody, so I suppose it’s a continuation of that lesson. We’ve had spectacular weather so far, but it’ll soon be cold, dark, and drizzly- time for books and jigsaw puzzles and making soup and crosswords and knitting projects. Damn. I didn’t realize I was already 80.
So- even if you manage to put some big challenges behind you, there’s always something that makes things challenging. It’s not perfect here, but I’m grateful to have a new set of somethings.
