Home Is Where The Heart Is

photos from my visit to the Victoria lily house at Kew Gardens, London last summer

Memory.

I must have been about 6 when I finally got round to asking my mom about where babies come from. She said later that she'd been preparing that speech for years, she wanted to paint a realistic picture, didn't want to be too explicit but still wanted to avoid the birds-bees metaphor and make no mention of the stork at all. She and my father had discussed it at length and decided to be honest. So on the big day that I finally popped the question, my mom made me a big cup of hot chocolate, sat me down and began to tell me the tale she had prepared. I wish I could remember any part of it, but in truth I wasn't really listening to her carefully planned speech because I was too anxious for her to finish the story so that I could ask my true burning question: "So, where do volcanoes come from then?"

My mom admitted to me over a glass of white in her back garden hot tub last spring that she'd never felt so deflated. All this build up and the preparation and planning, heated discussions with my father to decide what information would be included and what would be introduced as I got a little older in order to fully explain to their first born the beauty of life and of love. In the end, all I really was concerned with was the nature of volcanoes. Her bubble had burst.

I'm pretty sure my body's been hijacked. All I can think about these days is having a child of my own. Everytime there's a kid on tv, walking on the sidewalk hand in hand with his mom, or when I get the rare chance to talk with my nieces or nephews on the phone - something in my heart swells just a bit. I never thought I'd be that girl. I've always been more interested in volcanoes, or seabirds or making things. I didn't even really expect to get married, truth be told, nor have I ever had any intention of living a conventional life.

I sit in my little country house, sewing machine on the dining room table, fabric strewn about in summer colors, swept aside to make room for the laptop while I type this. There's a fresh salad ready for dinner when my husband comes home from his business trip to London, adorned with vegetables picked from the garden I've grown mainly from seed. Sorry, Bee, what part of this life is unconventional exactly?
Shift.

It's a shift in my thinking. My lifestyle. My sense of who I am. I get letters from my family that still remains in Alaska with their tales of caribou hunts and fishing trips. Uncle Dave's moonlighting as a 'bear guard' for the builders of the new gas pipeline and cousin Becky killed her first moose. This after having cleared her own land, falling and honing the trees herself, building her log cabin and all it's intricacies including the plumbing and electricity. She makes beaver mittens and runs a trapline for wolverines and lynx for fur to make clothes, boots and hats from. Because it's that cold in the winter. She got married this spring and now there's a baby on the way.

Could that have been me? Stocking my freezer full of salmon and moose meat for the upcoming winters? I'm reading a book my mom gave me now called "Merle's Door" Have you read it? It's about a guy and his dog and this fabulous no fences lifestyle they live in Wyoming, where their well written days are filled with skiing in the backcountry, hiking in the Rockies and hunting elk or pheasants for their freezers. It's got me thinking a lot about where I've come from and the 180 I've taken since then. My husband puts on a suit and tie every morning. I don't think there's a man in the entirety of my family history that knows how to tie a windsor knot. I often wear heels when I go out or sometimes even to work. This straightforward conventional life that I live now seemed so exotic to me when I was looking at it from the outside. When I was imagining what my life with the G would be like during all those years that we were thousands of miles apart and there was all that longing in my heart.I'm torn. I love my life here, my husband, my job, our cat - but I long for the freedom of my childhood wilderness and open spaces. There's no wilderness to get lost in here. I used to hike sometimes in the backcountry of Denali or in the deep into the North Coast's Redwood forests and wonder when the last time someone stood on the same spot as me or more honestly, I'd wonder IF someone stood on this spot before me. Here I think of all the thousands who've walked these roads before me. This is Shakespeare's county you know, where our summer breezes and winter storms have been immortalized in his prose. There's a building in our village that was in the Doomsday book (an 11th century census.) Before them there were Romans and Celts and Vikings and the builders of stone circles and bronze-age tools. Every tree alive today has been planted by someone's grandfather. Or great great grandfather. I live on what remains of a plum orchard - I wonder who's orchard was it?

Contrast.
When I was a young girl I lived in the house my mother and father built on the side of a mountain overlooking the Eagle River valley. I'd watch moose wander the riverbank below looking miniature because of the distance, I'd listen to wolves calling each other mournfully across the valley as I drifted off to sleep in the glow of the midnight sun, every morning I'd count the little white specks that were the Dall Sheep so high up on the mountain top above us. Now I live on someone's abandoned orchard. There was a brick maker here before him. Southam, the village 2 miles down the road, was an important layover on the journey from the textile markets of Coventry down to the storefronts of London and for hundreds of years, until the last 80 or so years, and the advent of car manufacturing, the humble village of 5,000 was the largest village in the county. The air is simply abuzz with history and it's magical, it is.Though I'm not convinced that I want to raise children in the context we live in now. England is an island the size of Oregon, jam packed with 60 million people. I want my kids to know the freedom of wild open spaces and hear the distant cries of coyotes as they drop off into dream. I want them to get filthy with fish slime from the trout pond or skin their knees climbing trees. I'd like to be able to walk them up to the highest point around and not see any sign of anyone else all the way out the horizon. I want them to know about skinny dipping in a mirrored lake on a hot summer's day and of digging up razor clams on the beach at low spring tide and of building snowmen in the yard after a big snow.

None of these things can be done here..... and I worry that my well-dressed man wouldn't cope well with the loss of structure. He is a chronic hand-washer, afterall, as most good English children are.* He's a good little camper though, my guy, as our adventures in the North Cascades, Vancouver Island, Eagle River Valley, Los Picos de Europa and around Tucson have proven. And he's eager to learn and do and experience more. Think he can throw in the tie?

*when I taught outdoor education here, I was astounded by the number of young kids who refused to hold the toad that we found under a log in the wood or were too afraid of getting their hands dirty to reach into the pool of water for a closer look at the stickleback we'd collected in our mist net.

Transatlanticism (or follow your heart or how to jump through the hoops of the UK Visa system)

It's been nearly two years since I turned up in the UK with little more than the rucksack on my back and the overstuffed suitcase full of English grammar books and lesson plans from my year teaching English in Eastern Europe. The G and I had met two years prior to that, we knew that we wanted to be together and were completely and utterly frustrated by the long distance love affair we'd been suffering through. As an American, I wasn't able to work legally in the UK (or anywhere in Western Europe (the EU) for that matter) and we were faced with a mounting pile of paperwork and confusing immigration laws and a sinking feeling that there was no other way but marriage to solve the mess we were in. So in the end, he said 'what the hell, baby, let's get hitched.'

I don't mean to suggest for a minute that we wouldn't have gotten married if not pressured into it by our geography and border control, but it certainly happened a lot sooner than either of us would have ideally wanted it to be. I think it caught my friends and family a little off guard, truth be told, when I left Seattle bound for a teaching job in Poland in November and returned a year later with an engagement ring and wedding bells in my ears. Nevertheless, we managed to pull it off in the end and I'm happy to report that neither of us regret rushing into it to this day.
Thinking back on that six months or so that I was here in England, not able to work and trying desperately to find my feet while wading through the ocean of information about work permits and fiancee visas and marriage visas cloaked in codewords like K-1's and INF4's and mysterious terminology such as 'indefinite leave to remain' and 'present and settled' and asking myself am I a 'highly skilled migrant worker'? is enough to make my head spin even now.

I thought I'd lay out what we did to sort through it all, so that maybe it'll make it just that much easier for someone else to figure it out should you find yourself in love with an Englishman (or woman). I'm about to get really specific so you may be a little bored, dear reader, if this stuff doesn't apply to you.I don't know it yet, but he's about to propose! There's champagne in it that backpack and everything!

The easiest way to accomplish marrying your beloved Brit, is to have the wedding in the States while he/she is visiting on their passport - the visa waiver programme gives UK residents 90 days in the US without any special permits and doesn't require any special visa to have a wedding in the States - then to return to England on a UK marriage visa.

The UK requires a special visa to have a wedding in Britain. This can take up to 6 months to obtain. You can also enter the country on a fiancee visa for 6 months- however you can't work and you still need the wedding visa to get married here. This is obviously an option, but an expensive one - keep in mind that each visa has a minimum fee of around 100 pounds sterling. Also US citizens are allowed 6 months in the UK without a visa anyway.

Note: I can only speak with any authority about how to marry and settle in Britain. I think settling in the US is whole lot more complicated and I am heartily postponing that mess for a few more years.

From the UK government website (www.ukvisas.gov.uk) :

You can obtain a marriage visa to settle in the UK if

• you are legally married to each other or are in a civil partnership recognised in the UK
• your husband, wife or civil partner is present and settled in the UK (see the next section)
• you both intend to live together permanently as husband and wife or as civil partners
• you have met each other before
• you can support yourselves and any dependants without any help from public funds
• you have suitable accommodation, which is owned or lived in only by you and your household, and where you and your dependants can live without any help from public funds
• your husband, wife or civil partner is not under 18, and
• you are not under 18.

Remember the key bit of information, you don't need a wedding visa to get married on US soil, so the next time your fiancee comes to visit make a quick trip to Vegas and have a drive through wedding in a pink cadillac. Next step; you've got to prove your love to The Man!! There are only three UK embassies in the US that process visas and they are located in New York, Chicago and L.A. You will need to schedule an immigration interview, you can do it online at the embassy website. It's very important that you keep all records of your relationship for your immigration interview - that means keep all those letters, e-mails, photos, cards, and add a couple of letters of support from family and friends just to be on the safe side. You will also need provide both of your passports though only the immigrant can attend the interview, bank statements for both of you to prove that you can survive in Britain without needing public assistance, any job offers and copies of your CV and diplomas to show you're employable, contracts from your landlord or copy of your property deed. Don't let the interview scare you, but do take it seriously. While I was in LA for mine, two other women were denied entry into the UK by the immigration office - so it can happen. Just make sure you have your ducks in a row and you'll be fine.

There are a couple of expat/travellers web forums that I found useful when I was researching how to do this marriage visa thing; easyexpat.com and justlanded.com where you'll find other people who are going through the same hair pulling process as you. Another informational website is globalvisas.com though stick to the government websites like the homeoffice.gov for the final say and to double check fees and everything.

This can be a really expensive process - it's not only the cost of moving overseas with all of my belongings, but the visas themselves are very expensive, not to mention the cost of flying to LA and holing up in a hotel for a few days while my passport was processed, and having to prove you have enough money in your bank account to live in Britain without recourse to public funds!! After 2 years, a landmark I am now approaching, I must apply for indefinite leave to remain which is fancy-talk for permanent residency and costs 510 pounds! After three years I can take the test to be naturalised as a British citizen and have dual citizenship which sounds so smarmy.

I'm sure most of this is nonsense for the casual reader of my blog, but if someone desperately seeking answers comes across it, I hope this helps! I remember finding comfort in learning that other couples managed to get through the other side, it's a stressful process, but well worth it in the end.

The Road To Recovery

After spending a week in the hospital, an emergency gallbladder surgery and an 'interesting' national health service experience, I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am to be laying prone on my sofa in my own sunny living room with a whole day of George Clooney to look forward to on Film4 this afternoon. Wow, what a week! I had a 4 mm stone blocking my bile duct and causing all manner of chaos in my body. They say gallstones are as painful as child birth - I appreciate you mamas out there all the more now. It's absolutely astonishing how something so small, merely 4 mm, not even a 1/4 inch, not even a garden pea, maybe a lentil? can cause so much trouble! I really appreciate the way my body works in harmony with itself most of the time, it really doesn't take much to throw it off track. Geno said this morning that seeing me in hospital has made him vow to himself to get his body back into tip top shape, so at least there's a positive out of all this suffering.

My road to recovery is paved with Arizona red rock. We've been planning a trip to see my family in Tucson next week and it's been most worrysome that this little stone might have put our holiday in jeopardy. But, I think if I can manage the flight - thankfully it's direct! - I'll recover poolside in the Arizona sunshine and leave the miserable English April showers behind! See ya later, alligators!

Ice Ice Baby

(He has snow on his head) We woke up at 4 am. I had a tummy ache, but couldn't get back to sleep because there was 6 inches on snow on the ground! Exciting! We went for an early morning walk when everything is still so quiet and the snow has dampened all sound. We wrote secret messages in the snow, we threw snowballs and trees, road signs and each other, we followed animal tracks and imagined ourselves antarctic explorers. We got back to the house by 7:30, G watched match of the day and we promptly fell asleep in front of the tv until noon. Afterall, that's what Sundays are made for.

F is for Flare-up

I want to formally apologize to a certain dear friend of mine who has suffered from IBS long before I ever even dreamed it could happen to me too. I can recall a certain incident involving an emergency shit in someone's unsuspecting hedge in Wallingford on our way down to see the fireworks at Gasworks Park for the 4th of July and my obvious and insensitive annoyance of having to take you back home. There were other occasions too when you complained that you didn't feel well enough to make our dinner date or to come over to some party or another that I was throwing and I sighed in exasperation.

Vengeance is upon me now, and how! All of my eye-rolling and mutterings of 'it can't really be that bad....' started to wane when I began having emergency shits myself, mostly on holiday when dietary indiscretions are inevitable. (Forgive me please for my demarcation of that construction site in Krakow as I was stumbling back to my flat from a late night out with friends, near that pretty little alpine lake in Spain where we just enjoyed a picnic of chorizo and goat's cheese, and that poor little struedel house in Berlin, I enjoyed my wienerschnitzel very much until it turned on me.)

As I'm writing this, I'm writhing in pain from yet another flare up of this weird disorder. I, like many of you I'm sure, thought that IBS was something that was a psychological problem created by stressed out people who if they would just calm down they would feel healthy again like the rest of us. It really wasn't such a big deal, what's the fuss all about? After more than a year of suffering alternating bouts of diarrhea that strikes with cruel precision and often without warning when you're standing in line at the bank, in the car and on a long road trip or going for a run outside Coombe Abbey Country Park and there's not a toilet for 3 miles. And then there's the following weeks of constipation and the painful bloating and discomfort that comes with that and the time spent looking like Hiro from Heroes, stopping time. And then came the medical investigations - some of them invasive, but all of them time consuming, anxiety creating, and ultimately unnecessary.


Why am I going on about this? For one thing, I feel like an ass for being so insensitive (though I don't think ever directly) and not taking the time to understand what a dear friend was going through. It's embarrassing, to say the least, to sheepishly explain that you have to leave the movie cinema immediately or you might explode. I get that now. I also hope to be some kind of advocate for raising awareness about IBS, it's likely that you know someone who has it - they say 1 in 5 Americans will have it at some point in their lifetimes. Some 4 million Brits are affected.

From Heather Van Vorous, IBS expert "IBS is indisputably a physical problem. Simply put, the brain-gut interaction of people with IBS influences their bowel pain perception and motility. In a nutshell, the processing of pain information within the central nervous system varies between normal individuals and those of us with IBS, with the result that we can experience even normal GI contractions as painful. The interactions between our brains, central nervous systems and GI systems are just not functioning properly. We have colons that react to stimuli that do not affect normal colons, and our reactions are much more severe."

This morning, I measured my amazing bloated girth. Even my husband is suspicious that I'm 5 months pregnant, and he knows better. My waist is normally large at 35 inches, but it has today expanded to an incredible 43 inches. I can't bend at the waist. I don't have any clothes that I can wear comfortably, and with the painful contractions from being so blocked up that drop me to my knees on occasion, I'm really not able to leave the house today.

On losing my tongue

'You can't have it all, Brooke.' It seems I've been hearing this loathsome phrase falling from the lips of surprisingly too many people recently. These are words I've never really believed in before, never accepted them as pertinent to my life, and dodged them with the same intensity I swerved out of the trajectory of that big red rubber ball in jr. high gym class. That phrase doesn't apply to me, I've insisted, with clenched fists and my jaw set against it. I am slowly beginning to realize for the first time in my life, that I may have to accept this tenet of adulthood as truth, afterall. I recently came across this post from Kerstin at Gipsy Life, and it got me thinking about what a weird, wonderfully frustrating thing being an ex-pat can be.


I often get blamed for things American, though I've only touched down on U.S. soil twice in the best part of three years. "Why won't you guys let Amy Winehouse in for the Grammys?" they interrogate, holding me personally accountable for U.S. Immigration policy and wholly expecting me to answer for the injustice. Or when they ask about the current election progress, who I think will win, what do the candidates stand for, what is popular opinion, which states are red states or blue - I realize with a sinking heart that I really have no idea what's going on in America anymore, nor do I fully understand the idiosyncrasies of British politics or English society at large, for that matter.

The issue of accent is a hugely important marker of both class and geography here in Britain. The subtleties in tone and cadence are completely lost on me. The sociologist I've become since moving abroad has noticed that when people are introduced for the first time, their accent is usually first discussed in order to set them into the correct status boxes. My husband denies this, but still does pretty accurate impressions of the accents of people he thinks are wankers, so I know he's paying attention. I'm often asked, so where is your accent from? Which makes me laugh, because it implies that I'm completely disembodied from the way that I speak.

My own voice is becoming increasingly more and more muddled. Last autumn, I sat at an airport bar in Minneapolis next to a Canadian who insisted that I was British because of the way I talk. You wouldn't get any of my neighbors here suggesting I sounded English, but my friends and family at home point out the idioms I can't keep straight anymore, the way I'll complain that the weather is doing my head in or Geno is taking the piss and I can't remember the American way to say the same thing. My seven year old niece accuses me of speaking Chinese and giggles uncontrollably when I mistakenly call the trash, the rubbish instead. I lead a double life of zucchini and courgette, of petrol and gasoline, and where the sycamore tree is a completely different species altogether. (acer macrophyllum - big leaf maple to me!)

I don't exactly fit in, in either place, anymore. When I go back to the States, I marvel at how egocentric it is. International affairs are hardly a blemish on the nightly news or everyday conversation, with the glaring exception of anything 'threatening freedom and democracy', of course. I'm flabbergasted at the way there seems to be this campaign of fear nobody living there even notices anymore. You can't turn on the TV without there being some imminent terrorist attack about to take place or go in to the grocery store without being aware that the 'alert level is orange' or whatever it happens to be that week.

My parents are convinced that I'm going to blow up at any given time over here, and it saddens me to think that this will prevent them from probably ever coming to visit me. I know that I didn't notice the propaganda (for lack of a better word) when I was living there, my parents fervently deny it exists, accuse me of conspiracy theories, but it's just one of those forest from the trees things - they've never experienced a media that is essentially free from corporate or political interests. It's one of those things you'd never really pick up on unless you lived somewhere else long enough, I guess.

That downside of American life leads me to the discussion of the ups and downs of a life in Britain. Though, in general, there's this English stiff upper lip, the 'just get on with it' attitude that keeps living in fear of bombings from the IRA (historically) and other fundamentalist whackos (more recently) at arm's distance, but that same attitude also means that things are much more complicated here than they have to be.

Geno is always telling me to stop moaning about the cost of electricity, for example, when I complain that we can't afford to use the clothes dryer. He reminds me that I come from the most luxurious country on Earth and shouldn't expect the rest of the world to have the same standards of convenience. 'But....' I stammer, 'There are efficient clothes dryers out there! It doesn't have to take 2 hours and exorbitant electricity to dry a load of laundry!' The list of things people live with (or without) because 'that's the way it is' is admittedly shocking to someone from America's luxurious lap. Like insulation and central heating, for instance. We have neither, and heat our house with a coal fire (yes, coal. Really.) and no one bats an eye at it. It's perfectly acceptable to only have one room in the house available for use in the wintertime. Perfectly normal. 'But we rent the whole house,' I complain. They sigh and explain to me, like I was a child, about the way life is.

As Kerstin also mentions in her blog post about living in Britain, life here is often a financial struggle. Things are very much more expensive here; the cost of housing is astronomical (because there's 65 million people living on land the size of Oregon and space is precious), heating and electricity (only recently privatized), running a car (petrol is a staggering $10 a gallon) not to mention car tax and annual MOT (where your car is checked over by a mechanic and your forced to replace anything that isn't working perfectly), groceries and eating out (we can afford a meal out maybe once a month), clothing and shoes (where standards of acceptable fashion are much higher here), and public transport is a complete joke. An expensive joke. It costs nearly $200 to take a train into London from Coventry during peak hours.

Despite these major financial obstacles, the quality of life is much better here. Take my job benefits, for example, I'm given 26 paid days off a year, not including the 12 national holidays that I'm paid for when the college is not open. If I were to fall ill or get hit by a bus, I'd have 6 months at full pay to recover and another year and half pay. I get a pension and continuing education benefits as well. If we were to have a child, we would both be given paid maternity/paternity leave. Not to mention a super duper biggie - health care is nationalized, which means it is paid for through your national insurance tax and that everyone is covered, even tourists will get free emergency treatment.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Well, yes, if you don't mind run-down and bug-infested hospitals, old equipment, ten-minute doctor's appointments, long waiting lists for investigative procedures and surgeries, and no preventative care to speak of. You can only choose a GP within your postal code area, if you move, you're forced to change doctors. And customer service? Forget it! I had to go to A&E (accident and emergency, the ER) at one point this winter, when I was having particularly nasty trouble with my belly, and the receptionist at the desk took one look at me and said in a nasty voice "So, what's wrong with you then?" Four hours later I got an x-ray and was sent on my way with a bottle of lactulose and nothing in the way of instruction. I had a load of (invasive) investigative tests in December and still haven't received the results!

That said, I hadn't had health insurance in America since I was 23 and if these problems were to have arisen then, I wouldn't know how I would have been able to find treatment. Even fractional and substandard medicine is better than no medicine at all when it comes down to it. An American friend's father recently died waiting to turn 62 so his medicare benefits would cover a heart work-up. He was 2 months shy of his 62nd birthday. That is truly criminal, in my opinion.

I'm babbling aren't I? I have to admit, I often fantasize about moving back to the States, where the buffalo roam and the purple mountains majesty and all that, but at what cost? Can I go back to 7 days of holiday a year? To no or restricted health coverage? All you can eat 24 hour diners? Shopping centers that are open on Sundays? Can you live with (or without) these things?

P.S. The photos are from along the canal that runs through our village during the recent cold snap that kept the ducks' feet dry and left us with this enchanting hoar frost for the best part of the week.

Happy Birthday (to me)!

When it comes to New Year's resolutions, I find that I'm always a little late on coming up with anything. I never really give it any thought until someone inevitably asks me on New Year's Eve what I've resolved to do this year. What improvements I'll make, what nasty habits I'll swear off, what I'll vow to do with religious devotion. I usually shrug and think 'oh yeah.... new year's resolutions' with wonder and frankly, at a complete loss as to what to wish for. Instead, I save them for my January birthday, by now I've had a couple of weeks to think things through and the post-holiday depression is usually beginning to wane at this point and my motivation to get out of bed in the morning is slowly returning.

I read in the Guardian around Christmas time that men and women require different strategies in order to keep their resolutions. Men, of course, should write them down, measure themselves against bite-size, but concrete targets that are easily achievable, make charts and graphs following their progress visually, thus encouraging them to continue down the path of improvement. Women, on the other hand, react most strongly to shame and embarrassment. What am I on about? It said that women should tell friends and family about their resolutions and in doing so it should motivate them not to want to suffer the disesteem of failing to follow through with them. Though avoiding embarrassment is the primary incentive here, the support and encouragement offered by others will hopefully be of some benefit as well.

I choose to go down both roads, never being the traditionally feminine type anyhow. I've made some charts and graphs, and now I'm telling all of you about my birthday resolutions.... They're simple really, and rather standard ones. Firstly, there's the getting fit. I've set myself the achievable, petite targets; exercise 3 1/2 hours a week, lose 5lbs a month, plan healthy meals and snacks. Easy peasy. Then there's the financial stability resolution - that's a new one for me. I've made myself a budget (with a little graph!) with an aim to pay off my credit card debt (over the next two years!) and save up for a trip home to Seattle this summer for my friend's wedding. I've never tried this financial responsibility thing before, so fingers crossed that I can avoid the yarn and fabric shop over-indulgence. Finally, there's the be a better friend resolution. I have the worst habit of never replying to text messages, e-mails, phone calls and even scrabulous on facebook. My new mantra will be reply, reply, reply.

And that's that. Happy Birthday!