For three weeks I have been sick. Both of us have. The overlap of the flu that hammered us lasted over a month elapsed time between both of us feeling good to feeling good again and it was so virulent and powerful, we both fully understood for the first time in our lives that this stuff could kill you. It has knocked us down to the point of emergency room visits and courses of antibiotics to deal with secondary infection.
And I know why we succumbed. It turns out that uprooting one’s life and shlepping one’s stuff thousands of miles away, culturally, physically emotionally and psychologically is a more difficult thing to do than we had anticipated, than we could have known. Even though the place we landed is magical and beckoning, beautiful, welcoming, gracious, steeped in history and complete with a big ocean crashing ashore, to force-fit that much sea-change in one’s life is asking for trouble. Is asking for illness.
Now that we know this we are getting flu shots for next season. Problem solved.
Except that it isn’t. The big-shouldered wooded ridge line that commands the view from our veranda is about 500 meters in elevation. The distance across the valley is probably five kilometers and I can just make out individual trees on the skyline. The sky is clear and blue and the commercial jets leaving Porto streak overhead in legions to the rest of Europe, their contrails parallel, to the world beyond this continent, maybe some of them to New Zealand where as a young man I rode my bicycle the length of the country, sailed their boisterous waters and fell in love with a country so gentle and picturesque that it seems to offer the whole color spectrum all in the various possible greens. A country so gentle and mannerly there is the expected offer of lunch to a traveler one might find hitch-hiking. A country and a people so bludgeoned last week they are aghast and there is no possible understanding of this kind of cruelty.
Would that we could somehow evolve out of hatred and out of fear of otherness. Would that we could live our lives only concerned about flu-shot decisions and the parallel contrails above the individual trees on the skyline across the valley.
Well said, Rick, and sadly our reality.
Feeling the same way here….