Tag: Altea

(…continued from "Of Mice and Men)

The look on David’s face took away my own smile. He had only been outside for five minutes, but I knew that something had happened in that short time to make him look this way. He had run into our landlord Paco, who, coincidentally, had exited his house at just the same time that David had exited ours. He had spoken with David, but, this time, it wasn’t about his family or childhood memories. This time, it was about mine. It was about the visitors who had arrived just hours earlier—the four people who had piled out of the car and entered our home. He asked David how long they were planning on staying and when David told him a couple of weeks, he replied they could stay two or three days, but then would have to find other accommodations.

Robert Burns once wrote, "The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry." Oh, how very true that statement is. Life is unpredictable. You may try to create the blueprints and lay the groundwork to make it happen, but, at any moment, life can throw you a curveball; and when that happens, all you can do is take a swing. It happened to us in New York. One of us getting laid off would have been a fastball. But both of us getting laid off within a week of each other turned out to be a curveball—one that sent us for a loop and dropped us off in Spain.

Moving day is just around the corner! We’re excited to settle into our new house and thrilled that we’ll soon be able to call Altea home. How great it feels to finally be able to focus on the future because, for a while, it felt as though we couldn’t escape from the past. The fact that the restaurant project with David’s dad didn’t work out quite as we had hoped had filled us with disappointment and it took most of the summer to come to terms with how things had panned out. But we have officially put the regret of Al Cante behind us and have wholly turned our attention to the future.

On November 15th, David and I will be moving and we’ll be taking our two cats and our 22 boxes with us. Torrevieja, with its close proximity to David’s family and its cheap rent has been a good transition place for us. But it isn’t our home, and we’ve known for a while that we don’t want to stay. We just didn’t know where we wanted to go. But now we do, and I’m excited for what lies ahead.

But the decision didn’t come easy. In fact, it was only after days of talking and examining our lives, including our past, present and future that we were finally able to come to a decision. The two contending locations? Altea, Spain or Paris, France.

I thought that Spain was supposed to have endless sun, but for the month of September all I’ve seen is rain. I thought that it was dry, that its reservoirs were only half full and that just last year it was suffering from the worst drought in 70 years. But all I feel is wetness as it seeps through my Puma shoes and soaks my socks and drenches me within seconds. I thought that I was going to have a year-round tan—as David’s (my husband) step-mother told me so when I first arrived—but I look up at the sky and only see a layer of clouds so thick that it seems impenetrable from any rays of light.

I fell in love the other day. It was the heart pounding, gushing, can’t-stop-thinking-and-talking-about-it type of love that’s usually reserved for schoolgirls. But here I was at 31 feeling it all in a rush as my breath was stolen away and I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was love at first sight, and I did what came naturally: I told my husband, David, all about it. I said it in English, and I even tried it out in Spanish. And then I repeated it again and again in the nooks of the small, winding streets because it only seemed appropriate to be declaring my love to this little village that had captured my heart in a language that could be understood by all.