Bend EXTEND

So the GMD (general music director)'s wife Elaine is this badass ballet dancer.  She looks like Tinkerbell, all cuteness and curly blonde hair and absolutely zero body fat on her.  But underneath her calling everyone "my darling" is the take-no-prisoners teacher who puts a few masochistic opera singers through their paces twice a week while she's in town.  90 minutes of every torturous pilates exercise you could ever think up, and then some extra ballet stuff for good measure.  And she clucks her tongue in time with her exercises, "bend extend lift drop bend extend lift drop bend extend lift drop bend EXTEND bend EXTEND bend and EXTEND" until you're absolutely sure that your legs have turned to jelly and your hips couldn't possibly be meant to move in that fashion and you peel yourself off the mat and despite all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth, you actually feel better.  It's good for you.  I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that pilates builds character, but it certainly brings out the personality in my colleagues.  Good stuff.

We've been in Germany for nearly three months now.  Three months is, in my experience, about the time when you start to see the cracks.  The newness has worn off, you've had at least one brush with either extreme inconvenience or extreme incompetence (or one as the result of the other), you realize you haven't had some particular food that's dear to your heart (peanut butter - I'm coming for you), and at least one holiday has come and gone.  When I was in England, my first big holiday away was Thanksgiving.  A few sympathetic Englanders helped throw a Thanksgiving Dinner for the lonely American, and boy did I need it.  There's a very good reason many of those study abroad programs happen during the summer.  Winter is hard.  It's grey and cold and the wind bites through your clothes and reminds you that you did not grow up in a climate where winter was a big deal.  Where I come from, winter is that thing that happens after Thanksgiving but before Mardi Gras when you put on a long-sleeved shirt and a jacket.  Maybe a scarf.  All those romantic photos of some New Yorker in an open jacket with an artfully draped hat?  Yeah, New York doesn't look like that in the winter.  But New Orleans sure does.  The New Yorkers are freezing their asses off and wearing the same puffy sleeping bag coat that I wear all winter long - from ankles to eyebrows with a hood.  But I digress.
Winter is hard.  The other nasty thing about being in a foreign country for longer than three months is when the country you're in doesn't celebrate those holidays you hold dear.  Halloween is not a big deal here.  Thanksgiving is nonexistent.  It's small wonder the Christmas decor came out in mid-October.  Christmas is the next big holiday that's happening, and they are going to get the most out of it.  Bring on the Glühwein!

What the hell does any of this have to do with pilates?  I'm getting there.

We have wonderful people living in our house back in Boston.  Lovely human beings who have a dog, just like we do, and love the colors we painted our kitchen, just like we do.  They have friends in the nearby areas and they are students of public transportation, so they appreciate the two train lines that run nearby, just as we did.  They even purchased some of our furniture, so now it's their furniture.  I am and was and continue to be very happy that all of this happened.  But there's this weird little ache in my heart when I see a picture of their dog in the living room that used to be ours, next to the accent wall that we painted when we moved in.  We taped and painted all of those walls ourselves.  We picked out the paint colors at the local hardware store.  Your first house is always your first house.
But before I slip too deeply into the nostalgia shame spiral, I have to remind myself that having these wonderful people living in our house makes possible our life here, in Germany.  Even if I wanted to go back and move back to our old neighborhood, I couldn't have the life that we have here.  Sure, we could pack it all up and go back, but what then?  Why did we sell 75% of what we own and move six time zones away, if not for this?  Why did we put ourselves through this crazy roller coaster ride?

Because we want more for our life together.  We want a life that involves eating two if not three meals a day together.  We want to see where this career goes and yes, I admit, I wanted to keep singing.  Freelancing in the States means you pay rent on an apartment you only see 2 weeks out of every 8.  It means you pay through the nose for the kind of health insurance that lets you go see anyone because you're never at home when you need to see a doctor.  It means you miss birthdays and anniversaries and births and deaths and even though it's cruel, you tell yourself and your colleagues tell you that this is what's expected.  And turning away from those things is not hard, but turning away from our families and friends and from the life we'd build on that continent is really hard.  When the days are short and frequently grey, it's even harder.  But when you get a day of sunshine, like we had today, and you have a really good coaching and your coach tells you that your Italian recit is actually sounding like it should and that it's coming more quickly than it did before, and you get to do something extremely ordinary like go to the grocery with your husband and smell the smells of the chili he made for dinner, watch a movie on the sofa and snuggle with the dog, you tell yourself it was worth it.

Every day I'm away from the States, I tell myself I'm getting more flexible.  Learning to roll with the punches in a language that I speak reasonably well but in a culture I'm only just beginning to know.  So when pixie-drillsargent Elaine tells me to bend and extend, it's not just my leg she's talking about.  And it hurts, oh how it hurts.  But it makes me stronger.

And with that, I'm going to work on the menu for Thanksgiving.  Even if Germany doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, we are going to feast and be thankful for the companions we have on this crazy journey.  Thankful, so thankful, for each other's presence, and for the life that allows us to be here together.