Awake and Dreaming

There are words, still a little out of focus, clattering to find clarity in me. Like typeset in a metal bucket, clanging to be let out. 

This time feels like redemption. 

This time feels like a triumph and we haven’t even quite begun. 

The first big trip we did quite literally on a wing and a prayer. 

Full of idealism and dare I say it, a unknowing hint of white saviourism.

The second we were flush with new business. Ambitious, burgeoning and struggling with more growing pains than I can even share. 

There were many times between. Almost nine years of time which seems impossibly long.

We dreamt up adventures over and over again, but we were isolated.

Shut in. Shut out. 

Meanwhile, we have consolidated and built. 

Expanding, growing children, larger by the day it seems, meanwhile, I've been getting leaner.

I have dropped more physical weight than I knew I could and somehow the emotional and spiritual baggage lost was more than 10x that. 

I’ve faced the devil and cut the fucker out for good. 

I’ve called for myself and let her in again. 

Meanwhile, they have commented how this new way I’m talking makes them sad.
Good girls don’t curse. They don’t talk about sex. They don’t walk away like I did. 

But I knew all along. 

This is not a surprise to me.
This was always going to happen. Because wild is not something you put on.

It lives inside you and you can only cage it so long.

Sometimes though, even for wild things, waking is a slow process. The light filters in and half shut, groggy eyes slowly make sense of the world around them.

Waking up looks like the unraveling of midlife. Dreaming in psychedelic colour for the first time and wondering how you never knew it could be this good.

We are older, I hope wiser, but I suspect we are really just beginning sometimes. 

So, here I am.
Ready for what will unfold. 

Ready for the hot sun that never quite burns. 

For the language that makes me feel like a child and gives me a whole new life.

Ready to walk hand in hand with my loves.
Slowly, with eyes wide open, wondering if it can all be true. Knowing it to be so. 

Awake and Dreaming. Again.

 

How do you suitably describe two of the most enlightening months of your life?
There is so much to write about Alcoba and our time in Spain but part of me is holding back.
I fear that if I put it into words it will become just a story, instead of the living breathing part of me that it is now. One day I will write about it more fully but for now, those memories hold a special place in my mind. They are preserved by my longing and loving of them.

The questions come thick and fast now that we're home.
How was it? Did you have the best time!. Your pictures look amazing. I'm so jealous!.
In short the answers are:
It was incredible, the best and the worst, lucky for those filters. Yeah, sorry, not sorry.

For those that want a little more expansion on that, the pictures are not really even sorted but here is a small trip through my very own memory lane, currently available only through these few images and lightly descriptive captions.
Enjoy.

Siblings walking the streets of Alcoba at Fiesta time

Fiesta Bouncy Castle Time

Driving the 4wd on the way to the Roman ruins of Clunia

The Ruins of Clunia

E's 8th Birthday

Just one of the 150+ chapter books E devoured while we were away.

Hail, while the air around was 25 degrees. Go figure.

One of the only times it rained the kids managed to get stuck in the downpour.

Crab fishing at the river

Sunflowers for days

Traffic jam Alcoba style

Out and about with Uncle Mat Uncle Mat creating a 'Flower Beard'

Watercolour classes with Paloma, a Spanish artist who happened to be our neighbour for a week.

Catching up on the construction progress.

Beauty by the wayside

When we arrived in Alcoba de la Torre we found a small sleepy pocket of history. Nestled in the province of Soria, two hours north of Madrid, down a web of country lanes, we uncovered our new home. It is a blink and miss it town. One in a beaded string made of main roads that break regularly into cobbled streets, flanked by centuries old stone buildings, through the heartland of northern Spain. We were met by Jaime, the owner of the dream casa we are living in which is nestled directly next to the remains of a 900 year old castle, complete with dungeon tunnels under the hill.
Jaimie is one of a group of around six families from Madrid who have followed their friend Pedro here, one by one over the years, slowly convincing various village members to allow them to purchase and restore old homes. They have done a fine job and assimilated into the village culture, taking great interest and care in the older people who still live here, many of whom ran these cobbled streets as youngsters.

Everyone we were introduced to has been so open. Rather surprised that these forigners would want to live here due to it's isolation but happy to have us join them. While only 35 minutes to a larger town and with other small villages in the surrounding countryside it is hemmed by fields of wheat, sunflowers and tilled earth. The families from Madrid only come on the weekends or for summer and bring with them the only english that is spoken in the village so we understood when the thought of this isolation proved too much for Emma. It's hard work looking after someone elses kids and dealing with another families way of living. Doing that as the lone young adult in a village where no one speaks english is undoubtedly daunting.
After two weeks and a memorable farewell lunch in the closest big town I returned her with our love to Madrid. She now contiki's her way around europe, surrounded by people who understand Like's and Lol. We're so grateful for the incredible part of our team that she was over the madly busy parts of this trip. It was sad to see her go but timely I think as it has allowed us to explore some of the deeper concepts that have been swilling about our brains with regards to parenting and living in general.
Even with our new friends from Madrid there have been hilarious lost in translation moments, like when one of the weekend neighbours Sandro invited us for lunch and told Mr Evans that he'd had a pretty relaxed morning, hanging out at home, doing cocaine. "Really? Cocaine?" asked Mr Evans, attempting to keep his concern at bay. "Yeah. Just chilling. Come soon for lunch" replied Sandro. With a little trepidation we walked down to their house and after a while I casually asked Sandro's gorgeous wife if that was a common thing in Spain or perhaps a word we didn't understand? "Oh he was cooking!!!". Let the hassling of Mr Evans commence.

My own moment came a few days later when Rofino, one of my favourite new friends here, who is in fact the mayor of the village, attempted to explain where he had gone yesterday. With zero english we rely heavily on sign language but I was rather concerned, although we were in the broad daylight, when he began unbuttoning his pants and pointing. As I dared to look I saw a surgical guaze patch taped just below his waist line and I had a new association for the word 'medico'.

The first four weeks our days were very quiet overall, with the exception of the late nights working, and allowed us the chance to decompress some. So much of the first half of this entire trip was a large scale decontruction of my thinking and our ways of being.
I have questioned it all and felt like my heart has been laid bare in a way that hasn't happened for a long time. It was raw and painful but entirely necessary and now these last few weeks in Spain have allowed space for the rebuilding process. Unfettered by the weight of opinion, real or imagined, we are picking the path that is being slowly illuminated, joining the dots as we look back on what has been. I am clearer now on my 'always' truths and while the days are not without their bumps as I find my footing as wife and mother, they are rich and full.

Morning calls but we are oblivious to the rising of the sun until small bellies crawl towards their plates.

Before long droplets of sweat bead consistently around our brows as the temperature moves closer to the almost unbearable mid day. In the relative cool of the early morning legs pump cylindrically as we hurtle down gravel pathways.
 I watch as her hair blows in the wind and his eyes shine as the speed requires extra pull on the handlebars.

Wheels give way under sliding gravel and we stop to recover. I am in awe of these bodies. All of them, growing browner, stronger and freer as our souls have space to explore and ponder.

Ripe fields of wheat which loosely waved short days ago, now succumb to the motorised scythe and we watch day after day as the landscape is cut in glorious patterns of yellow. Soon the neigbouring fields of green will erupt with sunflowers and we wait somewhat impatiently for the display.
Deer tread gently on the edges of the woods at dusk we're told. This raucous crowd is yet to see one but is that any wonder given the speed these children of ours move at. The quiet comes only when young heads are tucked in books. If not electronic there would be oceans of them, slowly drowning the free space about us. Instead it is their imaginations afloat, full of fancy, mystery and delight as sleuths uncover the truth and animals have voice. What a gift it is to love the written word. That mere marks on a page could weave a world in their minds brings me great joy.

There are other worlds here that unfold. Worlds where this daughter of mine experiments with reigning surpreme. She has nutured, taking over where mother nature fell short.
Her gentle hands have cradled these gangly bodies of too big wings and beaks surrounded by down and tiny pin feathers. With such tender care and love invested in the starving trio, the river of tears was long and wide when the nearby feline stole her prize.
All I could do was hold her and it hurt this mama's heart too. With divine display, just one day later three new baby beaks appeared, high in the rock wall of our courtyard, this time still tended by their mother bird, allowing us the joy again without the weight of attempting the care.

This is the ebb and flow of life in this quiet place. We are lead beside the figurative pools of still water and we are finding restoration. It is well.

After dropping Emma off at Gatwick where she was leaving to holiday in Croatia and Rome with friends we drove closer to the heart of London.

It was possibly the worst time to be without a nanny given that we now had books full of tradeshow leads to follow up but we had five to six days to fill in London for the sake of our Schengen visa time limits before we went back to Spain and her tickets had already been booked. Rounding a corner near to our next apartment we saw caution tape authoratively stuck across a doorway and questioned our online booking skills. Still, where we were staying was the street behind the crime scene and as it was late in the afternoon we decided to check it out and arrange new accomodation the next day if we felt the area was too dicey. I forgot however that I had to drop the rental car up the road and given that I hadn't set myself up with an oyster card yet for the buses and it was getting on towards dinner time, I walked the 20 minutes down Old Kent Road back to our London house. Turns out it really wasn't too bad a little neighbourhood and we spent the next week there happily in close proximity to the bus routes and Tescos.

While Mr Evans caught up on some more urgent tasks I took the kids for the day to Horniman Museum and Gardens.
We travelled via the big red double deckers which was an adventure in itself and traipsed about the beautiful property, stopping to admire llamas in the petting zoo, where you couldn't actually pet anything. It was lovely to go at the kids pace and I put the piles of work out of my mind, until the evening time that is, and we explored various parts of London over the week.

It was time to farewell Paris and shoot over the channel to London. We picked up our rental car after a fair amount of phaffing about at the airport getting mobile phones sorted, rewired our brains to switch sides of the road again and hit the M1 towards Nottingham. Nottingham was all about our friends Sam and Amy and it was such a treat to see familiar kiwi faces. They are the kind of friends that you can pick up with after a year of separation and it feels like yesterday.
We had pub dinners and lunches.