Will Our Next Home Be In Another Country?

I'VE JUST RETURNED from two weeks in Granada, Spain. Rael and I planned this trip to get a taste of what it's like to live there. We have no imminent plans to move, but we're scoping out different versions of our future. One of the more ambitious possibilities is living in another country.

Our 26 year-old son, Sam, joined us in Spain. He's between jobs and took the opportunity to explore his own possibilities abroad.

The idea of living outside the US hasn't always been on my radar. I love to travel and my family hails from four continents, but home is here, where my people are.

That hasn't changed. But in the years since my kids have grown, my relationship to home has expanded. I first noticed this, oddly enough, through my connection to the birds that frequent our backyard feeder.

From These Particular Birds, a post I wrote in 2023:

Home felt smaller [when my kids were little], tightly bound by the intensity of our foursome. There was always something to clean or fix or manage or cook, every square inch occupied, every breath breathed.

Home is bigger now, and I don't only mean because two of us live here now. Home feels less circumscribed by my house and more open to those not directly related to me, including, it seems, my non-human neighbors. My kids' absence feels more like space than lack. Not always, but more and more as time goes by.

There's more to it, but the bottom line is that the idea of home has cracked open for me and I'm drawn to investigate…perhaps by living abroad for a time?

We didn't sightsee much in Granada; we mostly just lived. We rented a small apartment in El Albaicín — the hilltop Moorish quarter — and took language classes at a nearby school. Sam and I took a beginner class to refresh our high school Spanish; Rael, who's further along, took advanced classes.

We spent the afternoons doing homework and grocery shopping, cooking simple meals, and hanging our laundry to dry on the rooftop clothesline. Sam joined a local gym and quickly became a regular. I brought along my ink pens and a small watercolor set and practiced travel sketching. (Sketching is a revelation. I'll share more about it in another post.)

We spent the rest of our time wandering around town and taking it all in. We got familiar enough with the geography and bus system to get around pretty well. We became friendly with our teachers and the local shopkeepers. We found a favorite neighborhood coffee place. We ran into people on the street we'd met before. By the time I left, I could begin to make out a glimmer of that newly-expansive sense of home.

As vacations go, it was uneventful, but as experiences go, it was incredibly rich, especially because we got to share it with Sam. All three of us are on the cusp of something new, even if none of us are sure exactly what (or where) that is.