Starting over

You know all those books about people who throw up their lives and go off for a year in Provence, Denmark, or around the globe to eat, pray, love and embrace hygge, that sort of thing. Actually, I don't, because I've never had the slightest interest in reading about it. But here we are, committed to selling almost everything we own, and, in mid life, moving our family (the two children who still live with us) thousands of miles away to new jobs in a country where we barely speak any of the language.

"Slovenia," we tell people, adding, if we're reasonably sure the person isn't allergic to the mention of the "T" word, "It's where Melania Trump is from."

We didn't wake up one day, like Mole, to say "bother spring cleaning" and set off into the world. It crept up on us over a decade. In 2008 we spent about half the year in Koper, my husband on a Fulbright scholarship, me homeschooling and enjoying the time off "work", all of us travelling just about every week. I remember announcing that Slovenia was a country I could live in, unlike the US, where I was sinking, year after year, into a deeper melancholy. Kind and generous as Mississippians are, I just never became American. (Yes, I know it's ironic that I'm going to Europe where, as an Englishwoman, I'm about not to be officially European.)

With the late birth of a third child, we were starting over and needed a new direction. Positions in the UK were not forthcoming; the University of Primorska, on the other hand, was ready and willing to welcome us both. I stopped half asking, half praying, "How can we get to the UK?" and instead asked, "What is the next, best, move?" And one day, it dawned on me that the answer was there: Slovenia.

It's been the secret that consumed us for months - furtive planning, vague answers to the innocent question of what we were up to nowadays. We couldn't let the news get to my husband's department until he had his work permit in hand. And all those months of inner, secret reflection somehow made my fingers freeze every time I sat down at the keyboard. I wanted to write, but what? Tell about the past 5 months in retrospect? Make it funny, cultural, informative, the online draft of a memoir?

Finally, I told myself: just write. Something short. Break the deadlock. So here it is. And there we're going.