Making the Leap We’ve all dreamt of packing it up and moving off to some exotic locale. When the kids arrive, it gets harder to hold on to these notions. Unless, that is, you happen to have just moved to the East coast from California and the prospects of living through another winter rekindles the fire of living abroad. We’re about a month and a half into our year in Spain now and I can safely say we have landed. My Spanish is evolving, albeit slowly. Our daughter is now in school here. We have a car (so much for our dreams of walking anywhere we needed to go). And I’ve just finished work on my ninth painting for RETURN – the cover, no less! I’ve been giving myself the freedom to take as long as I want to work on each piece – I figured we worked pretty hard to make this trip happen so there’s no point in rushing through my work here. Half the time, I’ll finish a painting only to realize it’s time to start over - after three or four days of inking and painting. It is true what they say about making mistakes – it’s the only way to learn. And that goes for just about everything since we arrived here in early October. We hadn’t realized that the home we rented was at the top of a very tall hill and that we’d spend twenty minutes walking straight up to get home from any excursion into town (thus the car). We hadn’t known that children here from age 3 (our daughter is 4) are gone all day at school from 9-5 and that random playground encounters with other parents weren’t going to happen unless we got her into the school system here (thus our daughter’s enrollment). And most importantly, I hadn’t realized the extent to which not knowing any Spanish would be such an impediment to finding my ground here (thus my Spanish lessons). So thing have evolved. And like my paintings, they continue to. One can hope, anyway. ;)
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 17:01:18 +0000
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