Nearly a year ago, Jack was fishing for sabbatical opportunities. One day I received an email from him while I was at work. Sub¬ject line: Madrid! Over the years (20 together now) we often fantasize about great adventures, long shots all. We sometimes, though not always, progress to a real possibility. But rarely do we see these plans through. The one exception was the 18 months we packed up house and kids and moved outside of Washington DC while Jack worked for National Science Foundation (Jan 2001 – July 2002). So when I read that Jack had an invitation from a collaborator in Madrid, Spain I somewhat flippantly thought: “Why not?” Quite frankly, I never in my wildest dreams thought that we’d actually pull it off.
Today we left our home in Reno and are en route to Madrid until August 2010. Even to get this far, it’s been a wild ride. Alas, I’m certain it’s nothing compared to the ride we just stepped onto.
Fall 2008
Jack corresponds with a potential colleague who invites Jack to come to the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid to work on a project modeling the effect of climate change on species distribution. New area for Jack – which meets his personal goal of retooling to have a greater impact on the world. He brings his physiology background to the table. “Sure!” I say. “It will never happen” I think.
January 2009
We’re serious enough that we exchange books on Spain for Christmas gifts. You should see our collection of travel books to places we’ve never been. But this time we enroll in first semester Spanish classes.
February 2009
We meet two families who have walked this path before us. They come over for dinner. The greatest development of the evening is befriending Wendy, Jeremy and Kestrel. Kestrel was about Alex’s age when they packed their bags to live in a small Spanish town for 9 months. Wendy tells us all about Kes’ “Big Sleep” at about six weeks into the stay – when language learning exhausted her to the point where she slept for 3 days straight. Now we know. Watch for this. Children thrust into a foreign language situation need to sleep. Will need to sleep a lot. Maybe sometimes for days at a time. Okay, we’ll know in advance.
I tell Wendy that I think one of my biggest hurdles will be renting the house. She suggests that perhaps she and Jeremy could rent it, furnished, for the year, with a very flexible attitude about check in and check out dates. Hmmm...
March 15-20, 2009
Jack visits Madrid to meet Miguel. This is when I think things will break down. Jack comes home disenchanted with idea of living in Madrid, and I assume this will nix the plan. Deep down, I feel some relief when it sounds like this could be the straw to break the camel’s back. But it turns out not. He meets with the study abroad consortium folks associated with UNR who are in Madrid. They are very helpful and let Jack know that our number one priority is to sort out visas. This comes back to haunt us. We should have known. Someone mentioned this. Remember, sort out the visas as soon as possible.
All Winter 2009
We ski. We ski every single day that we can. Jack and I work toward a PSIA Level 1 Certification with other instructors from our kids’ ski school. We go to dry land clinics every Tuesday night while our dear, wonderful, generous friends Shannon and Lou take our kids in for dinner every Tuesday night while we do this. We are clinicing with our PSIA pals on Saturdays. We are teaching wedge Christies every Sunday morning at Sky Tavern. We are clinicing every Sunday afternoon with our trainer. We are exhausted and happy and in love with skiing and watching Alex and Anna become such good skiers that we are in awe. We’ll never catch them again. And we ski every single day that we can.
I mention this because it means that we are not making progress on two important aspects of the Madrid plan: visas and learning Spanish. These seem like details that we aren’t fully ready to commit to yet. Yes, Jack and I continue to plug away at Spanish 111, but we’re not emotionally invested here yet. Not like we should be if we are going full immersion in a matter of months. I’m still telling myself this wasn’t a mistake. That the skiing was worth it. I’m betting that in about two weeks from today I’ll be wishing we spent more time with the flash cards and verb tables. But, it truly was a magical family ski year. It deserves its own blog.
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