anniver­sary

It’s a month since we arrived on these shores, and I must say I think we haven’t done too bad­ly. Avery has had near­ly four weeks in her new school to adjust to maths in the plur­al, French, Latin, net­ball, expo­si­tionary recitals, reli­gious edu­ca­tion, non-ver­bal-rea­son­ing (still don’t know what that is), dra­ma, danc­ing, swim­ming, and 18 new friends.

John has had two Euro­pean jaunts and has set­tled in nice­ly at work. We’ve man­aged to spend three weeks in a semi-dis­gust­ing tem­po­rary flat neces­si­tat­ed by the kit­ties, who aside from sneez­ing a lot, lord knows
why, seem well. We’ve found a home, moved to it, unpacked, set­tled in, I’ve made a bit of a home of our pile of stuff, cooked an enor­mous num­ber of yum­my meals late­ly accom­pa­nied by actu­al lit can­dles. Avery’s got (there’s no ‘got­ten’ in Eng­lish Eng­lish, did you know? always got) used to her home­work sched­ule, I have got used to my own pecu­liar sched­ule of school dropoff in taxi, mile and some walk home, house­work, put­ter­ing about unpack­ing things while research­ing on the inter­net what­ev­er Avery got inter­est­ed in the day before. Then I need to fig­ure out lunch, which right now is too soli­tary. Must make lunch dates, which could­n’t be too hard. There must be oth­er moth­ers wish­ing they weren’t fold­ing laun­dry at 12 p.m.

Now the flat looks pre­sentable. We still need to locate the per­son meant (not “sup­posed” as in Amer­i­can) to hang our art, and some fur­ni­ture still needs to be bought. I think an antique rug and table for the EIK (as New York real estate would call an eat-in-kitchen), and more con­tem­po­rary dressers, rug and coat rack for the main space. But still: no box­es! No rub­bish! Life improves, even though Keechie sneezes.

We have heard that there was an amaz­ing bon­fire of liv­ing refuse near Red Gate Farm, our beloved retreat in Con­necti­cut, from our friends Anne and David, and soon hope to hear news of Baby Jane’s first birth­day from Jill and Joel. Our friend
Elliot Sad­off was on “The Late News With Conan O’Brien” and if we can find a way to trans­fer the DVD his moth­er Alyssa promis­es to me, to some­thing you can see, we will. What oth­er news? Not much. It’s unsea­son­ably cold here, reas­sur­ing me that glob­al warm­ing may pass us by, at least this year. I have made the mon­u­men­tal leap of col­lect­ing (nev­er “pick­ing up” as in Amer­i­ca) our dry clean­ing and determining
that I am once more ready to wear… the dread­ed black turtle­necks. What a rite of passage.

Wish us all luck in our sec­ond month…