Our First Christmas in Portugal

Rain has fallen relentlessly for the best part of the last two months, and our local rivers – which we quickly claimed, colonially, as ‘ours’ as if to stamp our familiar Devon landscapes onto this new one – have burst their banks, flooding the paths we’d started to know by footfall, as we first walked or jogged along them in the fading summer warmth. Uprooted trees float down the racing Tamega, snapped tree trunks straddle their red-earth bank into the billowing water. Everywhere is rupture, and currents move at such speed, washing trees that had stood for years in one spot away, in an instant, to an unknown resting spot.

Yesterday, Adrian got a text from my Mum in which she shared with him her dislike of New Year’s Eve. The future fills her with dread. Admitting that, in this respect, I am my mother’s daughter is a bit of a smack in the face when just a few months ago we took our bold step into the new and unknown, but long-dreamed-of, life here in Portugal. We’ve struggled to add posts to this blog recently partly due to the busyness that accompanies a new life in a new land, but partly (I think) due to the sense of a shifting centre that we can’t clearly locate. Like those trees who’d long enjoyed the nourishment of the soil of the riverbank, we’ve washed up somewhere new. Unlike those trees, we uprooted ourselves. We made this choice. But it takes time to put new roots down, and you have to work really hard at it, and you can’t do it by yourselves. We’ve been incredibly lucky to meet some genuinely lovely, kind, funny, clever, interesting people who have generously shared their local knowledge and experience (and heaters and Christmas tree!) with us, and invited us to spend time with them, offering friendship which is the most valuable of all. The boys flew out to join us for Christmas (Joe is hanging on for another week!) and, in many ways, Christmas has felt like it usually does: the four of us, with Monty, going for walks in the rain, hanging out at home, playing games, watching comedy shows, chatting about life, the universe and everything.

But there are bits that are missing that have cut deep. Not seeing my Mum’s face light up when she sees us. Not hugging my sisters and grinning in greeting each other. Not grabbing an hour out of Christmas shopping in town to meet best friends for coffee and a cake that we still consider a bit of an indulgence, and squabble over who’ll pay the bill. And not being in our home, hunting for the Christmas lights that invariably don’t work once we’ve located them in a shoebox that I’d put in a forgotten safe place; not thrilling at the sight of tree baubles we’d forgotten we had; not inviting friends over during that post-Christmas, pre-New Year non-time which is when all the love you’ve not found time for finally can be shared around.

Adrian has insisted, however, on hanging fairy lights all around the garden, and turns them on every evening as darkness falls, where they twinkle above the orange tree.

From Seneca’s ‘The Shortness of Life’

Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately. https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/09/01/seneca-on-the-shortness-of-life/

#newlifeinportugal #retiringoverseas #Christmas #homesickness