{March}

I have a friend who purposefully takes a photo a month of her family. I realized recently that since repatriating I don't pull the camera out nearly as often as I used to ... So last week we put on matching garb and posed for our March shoot.

Not every pose will be matching (but, as many of you know, I have a penchant for children in matching clothes... much to MGJ's tween age chagrin).

Not every picture will even be a pose.

Not every picture will include the dog (although isn't she cute freshly groomed?)

Tuesdays with Beth & {unrelated} Jealousy

"I read your blog every Tuesday," my sister informed me. It's part of her Tuesday routine.

Sometimes she passes the link on to her friend or co-workers. (If, for example I blog about her tattoo, or her fabulous nieces).

But she's been behind, what with spending two gorgeous weeks backpacking with her husband in Belize and Mexico.

Beth Backpacking in Belize

Which was roughly the same time my in-laws spent in Hawaii around the same time.

My parents are heading on a several week long Asian trip again soon.

Mr Johnson is heading to Germany in April.

I on the other hand... wait for it ... might go to the zoo with the girls over spring break.

It's not just the green eyed monster of jealousy hitting, it's that my ability to travel frequently to alive and culturally vibrant locations is not longer available.

"Are we going to get rid of our suitcases now?" Bei Bei asked the other night at dinner.

Now that we live in North America?

Now that we drive ourselves?

Now that airline tickets aren't:

• delivered to our door by a man on a motorcycle
• relatively cheap
• dramatically discounted for children up to 12

I'm not sure the direction her question was heading ... we somehow segued quickly into car sickness and didn't revisit the topic. I did, later, reassure her, that we would hang on to our luggage. That we would use it again someday. I'm just not presently sure when.

Backyard @ The Bungalow (front yard too... but that doesn't lend itself well to alliteration)

The Bungalow, our 85 year old arts and crafts brick home sits on an in town lot about an acre in size. The lot is longer than it is wide, but if my Chinese friends saw the width of our yard they would consider it huge.

Mr Johnson and I got to know of our yard over the course of home ownership. We trimmed the old hedge, tended the forgotten peonies, cursed the creeping charlie that has crept all over the back yard. We discovered the rhubarb in the overgrown Medusa of trumpet vine, and rescued a sun loving lilac bush from a unsuitable shady spot. Mr Johnson trimmed trees with his chain saw, dug and filled a small pond. I spent a few hours every week on the lawn mower, creating neat contrasting lines of green across our acre lot. In the fall I would again get out the green lawn tractor, almost every afternoon when the leaves began to fall, and mulch up the autumn leaves while my babies napped in their second story bedroom.

And then we moved to China.

Five years of sweat equity was followed by five years of renter-level maintenance.

Our lot now looks not unlike how it did when we bought place.

Ramshackle.

Rundown.

In fact, when my parent's visited last month, my dad (who rarely says these kinds of things out loud) suggested we hire a lawn service. "It looks like it will be a lot of work."

Today I fired up the faithful green lawn tractor. Mr Johnson purchased a new gas can for me, with a stop/flow button and a trigger for easy filling. (He filled it with gas that now costs nearly $4 a gallon thanks in part to Mr Quadaffi's antics and gutsy oil companies who can get away with it.)

No leaves where mulched up last fall.

Given the despairing looking bald patches across the lawn, leaves haven't been mulched for many fall seasons. The leaves of at least 10 trees (not including the neighbors') filled our front ditch, my flower beds, the hedge and got caught in the lawn itself.

I started with an old rake and spread the leaves out to dry. Then I began a slow back and forth motion, taking the leaves of octogenarian maples and an old oak and chopping them smaller and smaller with each pass.

Instead of smothering the lawn, they will now feed it. Their spent lives now giving new life to the shoots below.

Back and forth over the ditch.

Then passes across the front lawn.

Out came the leaf blower and more raking action, followed by the whir of the blade as it chopped and mulched and cut. Then to the back yard, where the mighty branches of our ancient magnolia will soon burst forth in pink bloom. The old leaves,the dead ones from last season, those long, heavy oblong magnolia leaves where chopped up too.

My time on the mower is therapeutic, and I forgot how much so. In China we had a tiny patch of land for a yard. We tended it with an 'green' non-motorized push reel mower and trimmed with an electric weed trimmer. Sometimes Mr Johnson would cut it, but more often than not our driver and friend Mr Zhang trimmed. My garden activities were limited to tending potted plants and nurturing herbs in my kitchen windowsill.

There's lots going on in the world these days. Our globe found a permanent spot on the kitchen table where we reference the exact location of places we read in the news ... Sendai, Okinawa (where my brother lives), the Aleutian Islands ... We're also still peeking at places like Bahrain (I'm both proud and simultaneously embarrassed that our resident junior high student routinely schools me on locations in North Africa and the Middle East), even though the news media seems to have moved on.

It's lots to think about and process. It's sad and real and overwhelming and seemingly happening in real time (we watch as it happens), unless of course, you are my expat friends in China, who can only read or blog or sign into facebook or, even their google based email accounts, if the Great Firewall of China allows them. (http://carihal.com/news/latest-news-gmail-disruption-in-china-could-signal-tighter-control-pc-world-2).

My time mulching leaves on the mower won't change any of that. But it gave me time to think. To process. To consider. To remember the people hurting in so many places around the world today. To focus outside of my own little world, even as I live and work within it.

Learning to Live in the Middle ...

Last fall I clicked on a new option available in the blogger template: Monetize. Nothing materialized from it, other than ads in my sidebar and below my most recent entry ... ads that would periodically change and sometimes reflect something of the content of my most recent post. When I wrote about copious choices in the dish soap aisle at the grocery store, a friend reported that an ad, including no less than seven dish soap brands popped up. I'm not sure I'll continue with the monetization... To date, I learned today, I've earned $14 which is yet unclaimed as I need to share my tax info with google to collect my payment.

Presently, and for the last little while, there has been an ad for a storage company. The words 'Pack Rat' blaze across our homepage, and make me cringe. I am in the midst of sorting 'stuff'. I've been in this midst for months. On the China side, we organized 'stuff', on the US side we are now 'processing' the same stuff. All of our major thing are unwrapped, placed and in use. We are left with the untidy and unwanted bits at the bottom of boxes I can hardly stand seeing anymore.

Am I a pack rat? That’s the sense google is getting.

This is part of the weariness of a huge move. There are jokes abounding in the expat community about boxes that never really get unpacked. They sit in store rooms, and basements, garages and attics ... tidily contained in the same moving container, cardboard or box they were packed into several years and moves earlier. I am tempted to take those last bits, those dreaded dregs and stick them away, or better yet dump them!

When we were sitting in our empty near house, waiting for our shipment … When we had five chairs and a dining room table, three mattresses, and still lived out of suitcases (because, despite being in our home, we didn't have dressers) … When we had only a loveseat in the living room and a TV on the floor (and I think we all were thinking the dog’s bed was looking better and better each time we crammed five bums onto the seat and arms of the tired, dingy slip covered Ektorp we had kept in our basement) I came across a quote in a magazine that I tore out and hung on the fridge.

It’s a Finnish proverb.

It reads:

“Happiness is a place between too little, and too much”

With this move, and throughout this repatriation process, we are trying to find that middle place.

The Digital Age Hit The MidWest

When we left our little village in the heart of the Midwest five years ago we still had dial-up internet (cue collective gasp here). We had a house phone line we paid too much for and with a meager 56 K modem, we couldn't support SKYPE at home. We also paid too much for satellite TV, paying even, an extra premium just to receive local stations from Chicago.

Enter, in our absence:

Pandora (free)

Hulu (free)

a Digital Antenna Signal (free)

DSL (not free but fast!)

We are pleasantly surprised by these features and updates. Faster internet. Seven PBS stations arriving free to our TV antenna and appearing crisply in HD. And, we don't need a satellite. (Although, of course, it is possible we never did!!)

Back to the Blog ....

"Lisbon Rocks!" our resident Kindergartener announced this morning, after EHJ informed her that not only can they wear nail polish, they can also wear accessories at their new school.

"Are you going to put that in your blog?" EHJ asked. Noting the cuteness of Bei Bei's response, and perhaps also the paradox between their old and new school. (Which is not to say that their old school did not, in the words of my Nickolodean inspired five-year old 'rock', but that their dress code was much stricter, limiting jewelery to stud earrings and requiring hair to be pulled tidily back with red or black ribbons. Nail polish, as MGJ learned the hard way last fall, was strictly forbidden.)

But alas, I have not blogged. For weeks. February posts were meager. But here we are, thanks to spurring on by my middle (who often would ask for something NOT to be revealed in blogland), getting back on the proverbial horse ... preparing to ride this into the sunset.

I have composed hundreds of blogs in my head. Comparisons I, like The Three, could make. Thoughts about repatriation and the United States and our family and how all these things roll together. There are moments, like this fun and spontaneous one to share. And moments that can't be shared now, when emotions are still fresh, and when tears over where we are in our journey still fall more frequently than we would like.

We are not necessarily unhappy to be here, but we carry so many people and places in our hearts that the reality of settling down and settling in ... the permanence of it .... the putting down roots and putting away suitcases carries a sort of sadness. There is nothing easy about this part of the repatriation process.

And there is a house in disarray. Smaller in someways than we remembered. Tired in ways we had not anticipated. But our house none-the-less, and slowly warming back into a home. There is a mountain of cardboard in our garage, proof that we have gotten somewhere, made some progress, not been swallowed up, by the contents of a forty-foot high cube that arrived on the back of a semi trailer last Tuesday. Five men worked for seven hours unloading our possessions-- books, bicycles, beds, long lost toys and our raiments. On Thursday my parents arrived and with box cutters in hand, to help us unpack and unearth treasures from another land. They helped us organize book shelves and place Ming inspired furniture in our 1920s Arts and Crafts inspired bungalow. They pulled books off the shelves they had dusted and read to The Three, asked about their school, and encouraged three little hearts.

This morning, my parents are gone, The Three are at school. Mr Johnson is at his alternate office working on projects that are steadily picking up (the fact that the program we originally returned to the US for was 'suspended' in January his second day on the job is fodder for other posts with labels like 'stress', 'boredom' and 'you've got to be kidding me'). Outside the sky is dreary. It is raining, a slow drizzly rain. But, as MGJ announced as she stepped out the door and pulled up her hood, "it smells like spring." And indeed a new season is waiting for us ...