A pillar of salt

If you’re Lot’s wife leaving an evil city amidst fire and brimstone and you look back, you turn into a pillar of salt.

If you’re Erik’s wife leaving the city you adore and the best friends of your whole life and you look back, you turn into a pillar of salty tears.

What I haven’t written about on the blog yet -  what has filled every available inch of brain-space and conversation for the past three months – is the question of where to live when we return from Spain. And this week, after countless hours of research, talking and praying, seriously considering Denver and Boulder, CO; Austin, TX; Danville, CA; and San Diego, CA (in addition to returning home to Mountain View, CA), we finally, definitively decided. Erik bought a house in San Clemente, CA, 25 minutes from his parents and nearly the entire Allebest side of the family.

When I look back at the Bay Area, I see….

• A group of supportive, loving, loyal friends who have taught me and laughed with me and cried with me and been there for me through thick and thin
• Redwood Trees
• Green hills in the winter
• The electric, sparkling energy of Silicon Valley
• The best weather in the world
• Stanford, with its happy memories, family-like community, and soul-healing beautiful campus
• Bing Nursery School, which my friend Amber recently commented would always be her "happy place." Me too - I drank so deeply and frequently from that fountain of parenting wisdom. That team of brilliant Child Psychologists impacted my children and family profoundly
• San Francisco, that weird, quirky, beautiful city
• Our beloved church community
• Our beloved Spanish Immersion School community
• All the streets and parks and restaurants and dry cleaners and post offices that we know
• Lucy's Ballet school
• Lindsay's piano school
• Sophie's Gymnastics school
• All the kids' friends
• My brother and sister-in-law and their three sweet boys

I have been bawling my eyes out multiple times every day.

I feel like the Roman god Janus (after whom the month January is named), whose two faces look in opposite directions: one back at the past year and one at the future. My attention swivels back and forth between the past (which makes me cry) and the future (which sometimes makes me scared, which makes me swivel back to the past and cry again, but which also makes me really excited).

When I look forward to San Clemente, I see...

• Our very own house - a lovely house that we are both really excited about 
• A beautiful yard on an end lot that backs up to trails in the hills for me and Erik to run on (trail head right outside our front door)
• Our kids growing up with their grandparents and Aunts and Uncles and cousins and great-grandpa
• A beautiful community in a beautiful city with a view of the ocean
• No redwood trees, but lots and lots of other kinds of trees, including our much-loved palms and oranges
• A new life, to build however we want after this learning and defining and unifying experience in Spain
• A new Spanish Immersion school, which I'm sure is wonderful too, and this time with no middle school conundrum like we had in Mountain View
• A new church community that I'm sure is wonderful too (although I want you to know, Mountain View/Los Altos girls, no one will ever take your place in my heart)
• The place that Erik said he felt a confirmation of God's spirit - he stood outside the house and said "Amy, this is our home" and we decided to buy the house immediately.

I'm sure I'll keep swiveling back and forth between the grief of leaving the old and the excitement of the meeting and creating the new... but I am going to consciously try to keep living in the moment here in Spain. We have a whole month left... if I were still at home in the US and someone told me I was going to Spain for a whole month with my family, I wouldn't want to spend one minute on the past or the future - I would want to be fully present and suck the marrow out of each day!

Yesterday our dear friends Thomas and Christie flew in from California, in celebration of Christie's 40th birthday. The next post will be all about our adventures... they have already been amazing!