l'actualité

I wake at Anne-Laure's, whom I have never met. It is her home, or at least it is when she is not renting it to strangers, and one pieces together an idea of her from both the family snapshots that line the walls of the WC and the general atmosphere of the place. The walls and wooden floors are painted stark white, with Moroccan-patterned tiles in grey and white to enliven the kitchen and bath, and there are pops of canary yellow, fuschia, blueberry, and orange in cushions and rugs and framed designs, which combine with taxidermy and abundant linen drapes to create a modern "Pays de Merveilles" straight out of Pinterest. One surmises that Anne-Laure, who is a journalist, is creative and lots of fun, and that her small son and daughter are at the center of her world. There is the notable absence of a husband or father, except for a delicate gold band on a pregnant Anne-Laure's finger in one of the photos, which has disappeared by the time the second child is old enough appear in the photos with her. There is definitely no guy in the atmosphere of the apartment, as Steve pointed out the moment we stepped through the door. This is a Paris pied-a-terre for women and children only.

The sun has been up for an hour already--were we still in Stockholm it would have been three-and-a-half; even in Riga it would have been light almost three hours ago--and the rumblings of heavy machinery passing by outside started not long after the late-night laughter and shouts of loitering, drunk young men had stopped. Apparently Anne-Laure's little street is the ideal thoroughfare for construction equipment and partiers making their way to the other side of the river. It is the end of July, and as this is Europe there is no A/C, so the windows stay open day and night, making it sound like we are sleeping in the street.

A whispered morning prayer of gratitude while still in bed, then I get up to brush my teeth. Almost immediately Townsie--or Thomas as he is used to being called here--peeks into the bathroom, fresh-faced and sweet in a white tank top and no pajama bottoms. After the requisite snuggle into my legs, he announces that his tummy is hungry and he is going to get his own breakfast. He reappears in bathroom doorway a minute later, holding a large acrylic serving spoon.

"And I am going to eat it with this giant spoon!" he says in delight, then disappears again.

By the time I emerge from my morning ablutions, mascaraed and smelling of Jo Malone, Townes is eating cereal while he watches Violette swing on the trapeze bar next to the table.

"Mom! Look how high I can go!" she calls out cheerfully. 

I dodge in front of and under her for a belt amongst the luggage, then lunge behind her to grab a pair of black gladiators, purchased the year Townsend was a baby and we came to Europe with our nieces for the summer. I bought two pairs of sandals at home in NYC for that trip--both are with me on this one--and packed all my best clothes, trying to prove that I was not letting myself go after two babies. Even though my memories are mostly of looking around ancient marvels for a spot to sit and breastfeed, the wardrobe did work in the photos. I grab my bag and, right on cue, Steve stumbles out of the bedroom, rubbing sleep from his eyes, to pick up where I leave off.

The acrid scent of urine hits the nostrils as one traipses down the stairs and through the lobby, which is quintessentially French, in that it has the most gorgeous ancient tiles but smells like a sewer. By the time I am on the Metro, Steve will have dropped the kids "at school" which is what we are calling their daycare this week (since it is in French), and he will grab a baguette to nosh on throughout the day as he does grad school prep and researches non-profits back at the apartment.

During my transfer from the 9 (direction Montreuil) to the 10 (direction Gare d'Austerlitz), a dapper gentleman in his sixties several paces ahead of me pauses, looking back along the platform, and motions to a young father with a baby carriage that he will help them up the stairs. The father reaches him just as I do, and when the two men crouch to lift the baby, I feel the sting of tears under my eyelids. Little acts of kindness. They will save the world.

On the 10, holding the bar to steady myself, mine is one of six hands stacked vertically onto the cold metal. On one side of me stands a girl in her twenties, chic and effusing ambition. The young man on the other side of me is reading, as am I, and his suit sleeve brushes my arm as the train sways. He and I and the girl next to me all sway along with the crowd that is pressing in around us, and I remember what it was like to feel part of humanity in this way on the subway during rush hour in Manhattan, and how much momentum for the day I always felt as I rushed up the concrete steps out into a city that was just getting to work. I feel that today, emerging into the Gallic sunshine.

During the morning class on American writers in Paris, I talk perhaps a little too much because I am so excited to be back in a university setting and discussing one of my favorite topics. The professor is of the artfully disheveled intellectual type, which puts a slight buzz into the room of mostly female students. Referencing the Proust I read on the train could be perceived as a bid for attention and I do it with some hesitation, but it really is apropos--we are talking about Gertrude Stein's quote about writers having two countries, real and imagined--and he treats my comment deferentially. There are the expected photos of flappers and Josephine Baker, and familiar readings from Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as well a couple that are new to me from James Wheldon Johnson and Harry Crosby. I make a note to get their books when we are back in the States. Hemingway's A Moveable Feast was my favorite book when I read it at sixteen, and for many years afterward. I feel like I'm visiting old, dear friends.

Afterward, on my way to lunch, a teeny tiny Sofia Coppola pops out of a taxi onto the sidewalk right in front of me. My eyes immediately lock straight ahead and past her--standard NYC celebrity-sighting protocol--but I am not wearing my sunglasses, and the recognition has registered on my face. Her companion, a gentle-looking woman with long, romantically-waved copper hair, gives me a look of empathetic amusement, and after they have passed I realize that Ms. Coppola and I are dressed almost identically and have similarly bobbed hair. I would like to have been a filmmaker, I reflect, over my chicken salad and pain au chocolat at Eric Kayser. I even flirted with a film major all of those years ago in college. But now I am thirty-eight and into simplifying life, and my writing and design work and our family's amateur painting and music-making will be enough for my kids to build upon, if they would like to be filmmakers. That's how it's supposed to work, right? Each generation building upon the last? That's what Sofia Coppola did. We are not Francis Ford Coppola, Steve and I, but it's a start.

Toward the end of my afternoon course on French feminist literature, I look around the classroom. We have been taught by the chair of the department, whose intelligence and ease with the subject matter have made me wish I could note every last word. There are a few of us who are "older," meaning outside of the university system, and we uniformly wear expressions of rapture. The other two dozen students are currently in their last year at universities around the world, and the three-hour class is KILLING them.  They are falling asleep, doodling, packing up their belongings as a hint to the professor to wrap it up, and casually talking to their friends. Wasted! I want to shout. All of this is wasted on you! To be sitting here at the Sorbonne, no other responsibility but to fill your brains with wisdom to interpret the world around you! But, of course, I keep these thoughts to myself and make a little plan to walk over to Shakespeare & Company and buy A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. My copy was lost at least a decade ago, and a reference to it in the lecture has given me an itch to see it on my bookshelf again.
 
The idea of a warm crêpe buerre salé lures me out of the rain--I have forgotten my umbrella--on the way to the bookstore.  Outside of Shakespeare & Company there is a queue of three or four students waiting to get in, but a guitar-violin duo is playing a bit of Pre-War jazz in front of the shop, and it is nice to listen while we wait, even with the drizzle. Inside, I find a beautiful copy of Woolf's book plus a slim volume from George Orwell, and after the salesman has stamped both books with the name of the bookstore and I have handed over my twenty-two euros, I film the appealing young musical vagabonds to send to Jane--her Davis plays the violin and I think she would like the idea of his growing up to play jazz with Shakespeare & Company as a backdrop, his long hair in a man-bun and surrounded by a crowd of appreciative females.

The walk from the Metro to Anne-Laure's is always longer in the evening. My leather satchel (in pink, naturally) is heavier after being on my shoulder all day, and the air is sticky and warm. When I get to the apartment I put my feet up for a bit in deference to my marshmallow ankles, unused to an entire day of sitting followed by an hour of walking. Not my exercise model. The kids are bouncing around in their usual evening mood of agitated joy, ostensibly putting on their pajamas in preparation for movie night, although there is little actual evidence that any wardrobe change is taking place. I enjoy them just a little bit more because I haven't seen them all day. Later, I will fall asleep with them in their room as we read, then shuffle into Anne-Laure's bohemian mattress on the floor sometime during the night. There I will stay in a hazy doze until early morning, when the heavy trucks begin making noise outside again and the words in my head will wake me up and try to arrange themselves on page or screen. 

After my week of classes has finished, we will play wantonly in France for the last two weeks of these two incredible years we have spent in Europe. And then...and then.  We will board an airplane to San Francisco and hang out there for a couple of weeks before going Utah. There, we will to camp out at the cabin for a few months--maybe a year--and get reacquainted with family and friends while we do grad school and NGO applications. I will write like a demon to get closer to that magical threshold of 10,000 hours that promises proficiency (if not genius)*. And we will begin to outline the second book in what we hope will be the nice long trilogy of our life as a couple and a family. The first book was a really good one. We can't wait to see what happens next. 

(*According to studies, including those mentioned in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, currently a family favorite.)

year-end photo album, part ii

Christmas in Venice was perfect. Well, except for the large stroller that we had to carry up and over a canal bridge every twenty feet or so. When we find ourselves in such a situation, resembling Marie Antoinette's servants heaving a sedan chair around Versailles at hip level, all to preserve a princess's satin slippers, Steve says to our fortunate child, When we are very old, we are going to come back here and you are going to have to carry us around just like we are carrying you now. He means it, too.

But as I was saying, Venice was perfect. Food, the Holy Family, and Vivaldi's Four Seasons live on Christmas Night. Perfect.

year-end photo album, part i

After the merry-go-round of children's birthdays and holiday parties, some do a cleanse, some start a new workout routine, and some decide to get "clean." In our family, we prefer to partake liberally of each new year's cold-and-flu offerings. With difficulty getting out of bed and no appetite, the holiday pounds just melt away. This year we spent Christmas in Italy, requiring an extra little bit of effort afterward. Steve went for a sinus-and-ear infection combo, given extra potency by flights to and from San Diego for work, and the accompanying jet-lag. As for myself, I opted for a bad flu that turned into pneumonia. It's all the rage in the Netherlands right now. We chose a time when we would have lots of visitors: my parents and youngest brother and sister were here, and our eldest niece, Ellen. Such fun for everyone! Instead of day trips to Paris and guided tours of our favorite Flemish haunts, they enjoyed that ever-elusive travel experience of "living like locals" by taking over our childcare, cooking, cleaning, and running errands. We, on the other hand, had to do boring things like nap, read books, and catch up on all the movies and television that we had missed in the three years since we had our second child. And voila!  We were back to our wedding weight (yes, singular: please note that we weighed the same amount on our wedding day) by Valentine's Day.

So, after thirteen days of parenting staycation, or "bed rest" as the doctors tediously insisted on calling it, having read three novels and half of a biography about Francois Truffaut, and no less than five books that might be helpful in parenting--including one about the functions of the brain--and having indulged in so much screen time that we would have felt sick if we weren't already, it seemed like a good time for me to go through all of the photos we took during the busy season between October and New Year's Eve.  Here, the highlights, with captions and very little commentary:

London, by Violette

Zizzi Pizza, Cheltenham, The Cotswolds

October Break in The Cotswolds, England

Turning seven with a My Little Pony pajama pizza party

Turning three at the Christmas Market in Aachen, Germany

One more cute little bird hanging out at the birdbath, Aachen, Germany

Public fountain or artfully-rendered climbing feature, Antwerp

Not pictured: My accidentally-pretending-I'm-in-my-twenties trip to NYC for my friend Anne Butler's fortieth birthday. I'll write about it sometime.  Christmas in Venice coming up next post...

my beating heart

The sun was already setting and the chill of an early November evening settled upon us as I rode the Bakfiets back to the school for the third time that day. Townes chatted contentedly to me while I rocked the heavy bicycle back onto its brass and rubber stand and looked behind me toward the white-lacquered gate of the school. Parents and babysitters were gathering but no children had yet emerged. Inside the sandy brick walls of the school, the kids would be gathering coats and scarves and mittens before gripping the handles of their cartables, the rectangular, wheeled backpacks that are ubiquitous among French schoolchildren, to follow their extra-curricular instructors out into the courtyard.

Across the tiny street to my right, a couple of twenty-something guys unlocked the front door of their narrow two-story townhouse and walked inside, casually dropping their effects onto a kitchen table near the door. Through their enormous Dutch windows--every house here is visible all the way through to the garden, with no window trimmings to impede the curious glances of passers-by--I could see them collapse onto a sofa and turn on the television.

Soon Violette was wriggling onto the padded wooden bench of the Bakfiets alongside her brother, and I stole another glance at the house. The guys were now nestled even more comfortably into the couch, feet up on a coffee table, hands dangling nonchalantly inside bags of potato chips. I thought of the four or five hours of hard work ahead of me--the ride home, a mad scramble to get dinner on the table while simultaneously mopping up any mischief that Townsend was getting into and gently encouraging/enforcing homework and piano practicing, the forced cheery patience as they resisted pajamas and lights out, my anxiously awaiting the moment when their breathing would settle into the slow regularity of sleep so that I could rush back out of their bedroom to fold a load of laundry and clean up the dinner mess before finally dropping into my own bed. Just before drifting off into delicious but soon-to-be-interrupted sleep, I would set my alarm for six forty-five a.m., when I would begin again the long day of a weekday widow.

Looking at the guys and their television, I exhaled in a deep sigh. Lucky, I muttered.

I rocked the bicycle forward and kicked the brass stand back up with a loud, satisfying click, and started along the narrow cobblestone street and around a corner. I looked at the little fawn-colored heads nestled together in front of me, talking excitedly about school and who knows what else, reveling in being together after the separation of the day.

I'm lucky too, I said aloud, smiling gently to myself, and the breeze picked up my words and carried them away like a birthday balloon as I cycled us home for dinner.

--

The first performance of the evening was still going on behind black metal double doors. Outside in the lobby, where long farm tables and industrial chairs rested on Persian rugs for an indie recording-studio effect, I sipped green tea from a glass and watched Steve pacing around outside the theatre on a work call, hunching down into his dark, high-collared jacket, newsboy cap pulled down low against the wind.  I relaxed back into my chair, content to have an unaccounted-for moment, and pulled out my iPhone to distract myself with the exoticism of photos by strangers and friends on Instagram. After a minute, I realized that I could hear the loud, rhythmic beat of my heart, so pronounced that it seemed that it would be audible outside of my body. I put a finger on the pulse at my throat, and felt the evenness of it in time with the drumming in my ears. Maybe I just wasn't used to quiet anymore, had forgotten what it was like to be able to hear my own heartbeat.

Steve came back inside just before the next performance, and we stood with the rest of the very white Dutch audience and listened to a disarmingly sweet young black man from Brooklyn rap his interpretation of William Shakepeare's sonnets. Later, we would see a one-woman performance of the story of Horatio from Hamlet that danced on the edge of sanity and completely blew our minds.

At home, after our lovely babysitter, Ksenija, had gone home and Steve had mounted the stairs to check on the kids, I perched atop the pot-bellied stove in our living room to regard the painting hanging above our sofa, which we had finished making a few days before, and I pulled out my iPhone to take a photo. Again, in the quiet, I could hear my heart beating loudly. I tilted my head, puzzled and a bit worried, and listened closely. I laughed. It was the sleep machine app on my phone. Violette or Townes had no doubt slunk away, unobserved, with my phone earlier in the evening and, scrolling through the white-noise options, had settled on this one.  It had been beating away for hours.

And that, really, is what they do, these darling children of mine: they drain my battery, but they make my heartbeat so audible that I can hear it as it beats proudly away in adoration of these two tiny miracles. Happy birthdays, my girl and, in exactly one week, my boy. I am so, so blessed to share my life with yours.  May you grow in stature and wisdom, but always retain the wonder that you have now, at the beginning of seven and on the cusp of three, and the indulgence of your own imaginations. You are, and will always be, the most enigmatic, engaging, life-altering gifts that God has ever given me.

on time

The sign at the trail's head read Herzogstand, 2.5h, with an

arrow directing us to ditch the car, at which the clouds overhead were tossing smatterings of precipitation, and hike up into the woods to our right. The gondola to the lodge at the top of the mountain, where Joerg's fortieth birthday party was underway, had stopped running twenty minutes earlier. On foot was the only way up, and we had two over-traveled kids in the backseat and two exhausted parents in the front.

We had been late even before leaving Munich to sit in weekend construction traffic on the Autobahn. After a late-night return from Salzburg the day before, we had planned a morning of quick errands at Merianplatz--wooden hairbrush, giant pretzels, sausages--before our departure for the mountains. Parking difficulties and torrential rain, however, had turned our Hour, tops jaunt into four hours of leapfrogging from shop awning to shop awning, both umbrellas having gone the way of all the earth. From time to time our children would belly-flop onto the wet cobblestones and emit such high-pitched screams that every head in the square would turn in our direction, and elderly passers-by would fix them with disapproving looks and give them what I assume were lectures about their bad behavior in German. Back at the car we had checked the party email for directions only to find that the festivities were to commence mid-afternoon, not around dinnertime as I had thought, in spite of my having glanced over the email on at least two prior occasions.

Now, staring at the trail head sign and frantically considering what it would take to hike the two-and-a-half hours up the mountain with our kids and an overnight bag, embarrassment, frustration, fatigue, and, worst of all, the knowledge that we were missing celebrating with our friends, washed over me in quick succession.  I whispered Uncle from behind the hand covering my face and Steve put the car in motion again. We drove on in silence, past Lake Walchensee, stunning in the filtered light and framed by blue mountains, and cute little Bavarian chalets, until my phone indicated that it had 4G outside of a picture-perfect Bavarian restaurant.  In five minutes we had a hotel for the night in the next town, and in another five we were in the restaurant ordering a locally-grown salad and wood-fired pizza, to be followed by homemade strawberry and banana ice cream.

Bamburg, Germany

Davis in Ghent

Public poetry project, Utrecht

I felt awful; fatally flawed. Then, unexpectedly, peace washed over me. It was like the relief of a storm breaking after days of oppressive heat. The dramatic gesture of missing the party for which we had spent nearly two weeks and a significant amount of money to attend, all because of a minor logistical error on my part, allowed me to admit to myself that I had not been realistic at all about our summer and my ability to adapt to its constant changes. I remembered our anticipation in mid-June at the idea of having so many people we enjoy visiting in quick succession, showing them our new home and favorite day-trips, popping over to Belgium for a night here and Normandy for a few nights there, showing a friend's niece Paris for the first time. We had done it and were rapturous to be seeing everyone, but all along we had had the feeling it would be more fun to look back on than it was in the moment. Not the way I had envisioned it.

I sat waiting for the pizza while Steve and the kids played outside, my thumbs poised to make notes on my phone in the absence of a notebook, trying to make sense of our lives so as to avoid repeating such mistakes in the future. I realized that there had been several clues that things were out of control which I had been ignoring for weeks: constant difficulty getting out of the door on time, a physical sensation of always being severely out of breath, the fact that we left home driving in the general direction of Munich with no specific plans or hotels booked, even for that night, ten days before the missed party. I usually research like a fiend, brandishing printed sheets full of options tailored to our needs for any country we are visiting.  I had been so busy before we left that my sheets wallowed on my laptop at home, incomplete and unprinted.

In this moment of honest self-reflection at the pizza place, I also had to admit that I had not truly had a grasp on Time since our move last year, and tried to remember what I had done in the past to organize myself. It took a few minutes to unearth simple procedural memories: a single handbag tidied daily; in that handbag, a paper agenda, rather than a calendar on my phone; a dedicated time every morning for correspondence and calendar items; an apartment in which I had designated a place for everything, and never put anything anywhere but in its place. To do otherwise left me prone to the chaos of my mind, as I was demonstrating so thoroughly.

Over the summer, with such close proximity to so many people that we know well, I observed that individuals and their relationships to Time and Place can be arranged on a sort of spectrum, and that couples tend to be composed of one individual from either side of center on the spectrum, however similar they may be to one another when compared with the world at large.

On one side lives the Time-Keeper. If she says she will be at x place at x time, she is there. She views time as something to be carefully managed, budgeted, and spent. She is most likely an early riser and is good at accomplishing fixed goals. She is dependable. From the other side of the spectrum, the Time-Keeper may seem rigid or unemotional. Her less time-conscious partner may feel that she is not as thorough as she could be, or leaves things imperfect in her effort to be in the right place at the right time. The Time-Keeper views tardiness as irresponsible, disrespectful, and an indication of priorities. And she is not wrong.

Except that, on the other side of the spectrum there exists the Dreamer, a philosophical type for whom the physical world may be less real than the world of Ideas, Imagery, and Emotion. For this type, wrapping one's head around time can sometimes feel nearly impossible, and prioritizing and organizing it may take monumental effort. Without constant vigilance, he slips back into his world of ideas and that twenty minutes that he had to get where he was going somehow vanished half an hour ago. A fixed appointment, even something routine like getting kids to school or getting to work on time, may require headache-inducing focus. This type may lose things often or be forgetful. It takes years or decades to learn tricks and adopt habits that will mitigate these difficulties, and he may have to start the process over again whenever there is a major life change (e.g. new job, new child, new class schedule). The Dreamer may require a great deal of spacial organization to be functional. Shocking, I know, that I naturally fall into this category.

(I think sheepishly of a line on the C.V. from my early professional life:  "Adapts quickly to new situations and procedures."  True, if we are talking about new foods, music, places, or this season's trends. Not so, unfortunately, with organizational procedures, schedules, or unspoken rules of etiquette, although I wasn't self-aware enough to realize it at the the time that I was shopping this gem around. Luckily, aside from one corporate P.R. internship, I have worked in creative fields, where my adaptive tendencies are more at home.)

While our natures may be immutable, our indulgences (whether to be late or to be impatient with another's lateness) can be disciplined. In our eleven years together, I and my resident Time-Keeper have gradually moved to the center of the spectrum, although we will probably have to exercise patience with each other until the day we no longer have children at home. On that day, I expect that we will magically start being fifteen minutes early for everything, the years of resistance training having finally paid off. (Have you ever noticed that about grandparents?) 

I asked him, in the throes of my self-flagellation over the missed party and all of my other time misses this summer, how he tolerates me. He laughed and said that it was hard at the beginning, but then he started paying attention to how hard I was trying, how much more stressed I was about being on time than he was, actually. I already felt like a failure. He couldn't change that for me,and he couldn't wish me--or berate me--into being on time. In fact, the more he tapped his foot, the more fraught those already stressful minutes became, and the later we ended up being. He decided that he would change himself. Instead of seeing five minutes late as being a failure to be on time, he would look at my gradual improvements and the effort I was making. Aside from the rare big-ticket event, what were the actual consequences, he asked himself, if I made him late? Was he placing what other people thought of him or of us above what was most of worth to him? Was his anger or feeling that he was right in that situation worth what it cost our relationship? And how did these qualities that led to my functional difficulties benefit him in other ways?  According to him, I make his life more fun than another spreadsheet jockey like himself would have. Vague but I'll take it.

As for myself, I had to learn the opposite. First, I had to step back from my own stress and embarrassment and think about how my actions were making others, especially my husband, feel.

Then what? For times when I know there will be a lot of upheaval and excitement, I have to remember to schedule days for rest and organization. In college I realized that I had to get rid of my watch, which I would look at obsessively rather than doing the things that would actually help me to be punctual. At some point, after a missed flight on Christmas Eve early in our married life, I figured out that nothing works so well as leaving a big fat cushion before a serious deadline. I know that our weaknesses can become strengths, given enough time and work, because we don't miss flights anymore.

I have to repeatedly teach myself, still, after all these years, how to prioritize items with deadlines and make plans to meet them, sometimes at a level of detail that a child (well, a Time-Keeper child) would scoff at. Put shoes by front door. Pack church bag night before. Set alarm for thirty minutes before I have to leave for school pick up. I have to remind myself that emotion and spontaneity are good traits only when bridled properly. I have to watch the things that people who are on time do, and figure out how to do them for myself. Luckily for me, there are a lot of punctual people in the world to emulate. I make my travel dossiers.

I also have to convince myself again and again that not doing these things naturally does not make me an idiot. I have to remind myself that while Steve may run errands twice as fast as I do or clean the kitchen in fifteen minutes less, he doesn't always think things through and do them as thoroughly as I do.

It seems so simple: On time = Good. Late = Bad. The truth, though, like almost all truths, is more complex. The world needs all of us, Dreamers and Time-Keepers alike, even with the faults that accompany our gifts. We need big ideas and we need the trains to run on time. We want mind-blowing art projects and people to manage the logistics of mounting exhibitions that allow us all to see them. We need people at every position of the spectrum. We need that, and we want it, too.

That stormy day and night in Bavaria made the rest of our trip a bucolic one. We stopped in beautiful Fussen, Germany for a couple of days and had dinner in Lichtenstein, adding a new country to our list. I spent a day enjoying the collection at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland while Steve and the kids went to the zoo. We peeked at the antiques in Colmar, France and loaded up on local treats at a boulangerie in Strasbourg. By the time we met up again with Jen and Alex in Ghent, Belgium we were able to revel in things as they were happening. Sometimes it just takes stopping for a minute to look at things, even if the stop is a forced one. 

Yes, those are my thoughts for the summer, finally, in November. Here are a few photos from the second half of our summer. As you can see, it was not so bad as all that.

Skinny-dipping at Nymphenburg Castle

Boating at Nymphenburg Castle

Ghent

Sunset in Salzburg

BMW Museum, Munich.  I love Townsend's face, like he owns this thing.

Saint Nicolas, Ghent

Playing at home in the North Sea