dananicolenews

Deaths and Anniversaries

dananicoleboyer@gmail.com — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 17:48:49 +0000

“I was derailed, devastated by my father’s unexpected death—more than an overdue end of childhood, I felt exposed by his death, unsheltered, and all the comforts of connection I’d formerly disdained I suddenly urgently wanted. I would spend a decade finding them and building a home in the world, safe harbor, even as I know (and knew then) that we are never safe; we can only be courageous.” I found these words by E.J. Levy on a particularly difficult weekend last weekend; the weekend that simultaneously marked the three-year anniversary of my grandpa’s death and Joe’s and my twelve-year wedding anniversary. When I think of death anniversaries, and when other people mention them, I tend to think, ‘Yes, but.’ My grandpa’s death was worse than unexpected, it involved an official’s report in my inbox and every year since I cannot get the images out of my head; images I wish I never had to read, things I did not see but still imagine. And every year since then, the death anniversary comes around, and then the next day is our wedding anniversary, and I simply cannot wrap my head around the juxtaposition. It is true, of course, that all pleasure is tinged by pain, and all pain by pleasure, but it is the whiplash that gets me. I find it absolutely impossible to grieve and remember one day and turn around and celebrate the next, to the point where this year I told Joe we just needed to forget it; maybe a Valentine’s Day anniversary would be better each year. And though you would think it would get better every year, in the previous years we at least gave it a sporting shot; this year we didn’t even do a card. Each year it’s still consistently too much. Grief is like that, I’m told, it keeps coming back, but I think grief is also worse when it is sudden, because when death is expected, it lulls us a little bit. We are able to say things like, “Yes, it’s been coming for a while”, and “We expect it soon now.” We get used to it, and with people who have had a long illness we can even say afterwards, “I’m so glad they aren’t in pain anymore.” Sudden, violent death shocks us. It should. It still shocks me, three years later. It plays on my feelings of safety and of…

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The American Idea of Ease and Taking Out the Garbage

dananicoleboyer@gmail.com — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:06:38 +0000

After two years in Europe, going back to American once, seeing relations and friends navigate the differences between the two countries, I am finally ready to tell you the real difference between the two mindsets, and the two continents. Are you ready? (It’s in the title, so you better be.) First, the obligatory disclaimer. Obviously I am going to be making some blanket statements about two entire continents, and things vary over region, culture, and income level. This is what I have noticed in my time here, and in the reactions of my friends and family. I have friends here who are more on the American side of this, and European friends who are the opposite. Now, back to it: some people say the difference is health care, some say walkability. Some say it’s the higher focus on the environment here in Europe, some people say it’s a slower pace of life. (All of these are true.) But the real, true difference? It’s ease. Look, I’m American, and I can tell you from just looking at my own life that I will do ALMOST ANYTHING if it makes my life easier. Ease is one of the first things I look for, and one of the first things I try to find. Throw out all the trash together and not recycle? Easy. Drive half a mile to the store? Easy. And I think ease is the real reason why Amazon flourishes in America, but struggles in Europe. (Ok, it doesn’t struggle, it’s still Amazon. But it’s slower, less efficient, and far less used.) Americans use it because it has everything they need there, all the prices, all the reviews, and it delivers in three days or less. See? It’s SO easy. I realized, on our last trip to Croatia….. well, the trip was amazing, so let’s take a break for some pictures. Anyway, picture dump behind us, I realized that despite all the beautiful scenery and time with family on our vacation, that the things that made our trip feel like a vacation were the normal, everyday hard things here in Europe that I didn’t have to worry about anymore. For example, we stayed in several Airbnbs and one hotel on the way back. The Airbnbs mimic home (hello to their catchphrase, living local!) but the hotel did not. Do you know what needs to be done at Airbnbs that doesn’t need…

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Dragons and a Day in Slovenia

dananicoleboyer@gmail.com — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 14:50:50 +0000

Last night at three in the morning, outside the city center of Ljubljana, in a pink house on the edge of some soccer fields, Lincoln woke us up to tell us that he lost his tooth. And then when he walked back to bed, we heard a rattle as it fell on the ground. Whether that meant he had awakened, pulled it out and then lost it, or woke up and it was already nestled in a little crease on his shirt, we weren’t awake enough to ask. And this morning, when we got out of bed, there it was, small and white and hard on the ground, a marker of time passed. The day before, on the way here, we stopped at Lake Bled, and took the Pletna boats across the clear blue mountain water. The oarsman spoke only Slovenian, except for the phrases that all oarsman must know to make their living from the tourists; “It takes 20 minutes, it is 15 euros, you will spend 45 minutes on the island.” The island on Lake Bled is the only natural island in all of Slovenia, and the Pletna boats date back at least 500 years. They are flat bottomed, wooden, and covered with colorful awnings. Many of the oarsman are the direct descendants of those who carried the first religious pilgrims out to the island. It is a restricted and honored profession, as only 22 boats are allowed on the lake. The boys found fish in the water and the castle on the cliffs loomed above us, and the slight, cool wind rippled the bright sky blue water beneath us. Swimmers and canoers and stand up paddle boards went around us. “It’s the only island in Slovenia,” Eliot said proudly, when we stood on shore. At the church, a wedding was in progress, and the groom braced himself to carry his bride up the ninety-nine steps from the dock to the church, in order to ensure a happy marriage. The boys ran around the path that encircled the island, and when we stopped for more than a few minutes they started in on what has recently been the norm (especially after long car rides) some shoving, and a little punching, some carefully aimed kicks that never quite kick the other person. Thirty-five minutes past Bled and into Ljubljana and outside our back window, the Slovenian soccer players yell in…

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Toasters and Microwaves

dananicoleboyer@gmail.com — Sun, 18 Jul 2021 14:46:31 +0000

Yes, there have been things that have slipped through the cracks. Like toasters, and microwave popcorn. It’s impossible in any world to expect your children to know everything you did. At a basic level this isn’t a third culture kid problem; this is parenthood. It’s evidenced by the number of memes with cassette tapes and ballpoint pens in them, the number of jokes with rotary phones, and the amount of sentences that start with, “Well when I was a kid….” But the gap is bigger when your kids are raised in a different culture than you were, and this was showed more than usual on our trip to Lisbon last week. We stayed at an Airbnb where the owner was an American expat, and the apartment had some things that we aren’t used to anymore. Things like, a real genuine toaster which provided at least an hour of entertainment. Lincoln was the first to spot it on the counter and ask about it. “It’s a toaster,” I said. “For bread.” “Oh!” he said, excitedly. “And does it sling the bread up to the ceiling and scare people like in Rutabega?” (His cooking comic books.) Truly, I think in the six days we were there, he and Eliot together ate about three loaves of bread as buttered toast, and they would have done more had I finally not been worried about nutritional value. And microwave popcorn. For the eight years of Lincoln’s life, we’ve had a microwave for about half of them, and we don’t have one now. (And here’s a secret, I don’t miss it at all.) But we’re a big popcorn family and they had microwave popcorn already there so we went through the whole thing; unwrap the plastic, put it the right way up, listen for the popping, stop it on time. It was not as big of a hit as the toast. They didn’t really like the feel of it and the taste. (I understand, but I’ll eat popcorn in any fashion any day of the week.) But there are things that they are used to that I would have never been able to navigate as a child. Lincoln can understand a metro map about as well as I can, Eliot is never as happy as he is on an airplane (see top picture), and they both can be stuck on a Alfama side street at…

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Bad Ankles in Snowstorms and the Glow from the End of the Tunnel

dananicoleboyer@gmail.com — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 12:16:38 +0000

The truth is, I’ve had a problem with my ankle for five weeks now. I twisted it just a bit when I was playing tag with the boys, thought it was fine, went on what was a very excellent hike the next day (small canyons and wooden bridges and big stones), and halfway through that knew I had a problem. And five weeks, three doctor’s appointments, two x-rays, one orthopedist appointment and one physio session later (they call it physio here, if you say PT they will look at you funny), I still have a problem with my ankle. This is the ankle that gave way on me at my high school dance, meaning I had to have a guy carry me out to the car (as dances go, not a terrible way to end), the ankle that slammed sideways on a rocky set of steps going down to an Okinawan beach when Lincoln was a baby and I was carrying him. Which then led to me to get helped to the car by an old Okinawan farmer who promptly disappeared afterwards, leaving me with baby Lincoln in the back of my car, unable to drive and mosquitos all around. After even stricter instructions this time to wear a brace/cast thing AT ALL TIMES, and one set of crutches later, I was particularly upset that this ankle injury has meant sitting on the couch when the boys are home for Easter break (two weeks long in Europe) and the weather had just turned nice. Luckily for me, (is it though?) the weather has turned again and it’s been snowing the last three days. (Happy April!) Unluckily for me and everyone else, all the kids home from school can’t really spend hours outside. Also, in a real moment of covid irony, the Luxembourg government offered a long-coming act of good-will (or an attempt to pacify the people) by announcing that restaurant terraces would open this week, intending for people to have their first opportunity to eat at a restaurant in almost a year. They announced the restaurants would open yesterday, and yesterday it started snowing. (This has led to a proliferation of good memes, which has greatly enhanced my couch-sitting-while-phone-scrolling.) In the meantime, the boy’s school is closing for good at the end of the month due to no funds, (thanks covid), and the trip that we planned to cheer everyone…

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Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

dananicoleboyer@gmail.com — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 13:29:31 +0000

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?” “What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?” “I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said. Winnie-the-Pooh It’s less that I’m a morning person, or an exercise person, or a morning exercise person, and more that I try to do a few impossible things before breakfast. (I usually extend the ‘before breakfast’ to mean ‘before 900’ in my head.) Either way, doing something early sets the tone for the day, it helps me think that in fact, I could do anything, including whatever the rest of the day may hold. But this morning was 16 degrees and low-grade snowing and I had to drive the boys in to school because it was my morning (yes, my skills have much improved since my last driving post, I only killed the car once this morning and that time was barely my fault. (I’m looking at you, hill-that-I-hate.) See, driving the boys into school, through the morning traffic and up The Hill, used to be my impossible thing before breakfast, but as time has passed it’s become more possible. Funny how that works, yes? How the things you could never do eventually become something you can do, and then something you barely even think about doing. (For those keeping track, I am still in that middle stage in my driving, and still very much looking forward to the last stage.) But back to the 16 degrees and snowing. (That’s -8 degrees Celsius if anyone is keeping track, saying winter temperatures in Celsius makes it sound much more harrowing.) My running this last year has been anything but exemplary. Blame covid or the cold or my children or the low iron my doctor discovered a few months ago or blame all of those things together like I have– only to come around to the realization that I’ve just gotten out of the routine after all. So just going out to do a run in and of itself seems impossible lately. Add to that the morning, this morning, and the snow, and the cold, and you have me, sitting alone in my car and already in gloves, staring through the frosted windshield at the trail that was waiting for me. And at -8, you can’t even really just sit in the…

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The Ever-Changing Room

dananicoleboyer@gmail.com — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 09:38:09 +0000

It’s not pretty, this new thing we have that I call The Ever-Changing Room. When we first moved here, we started the boys off in their room with lifted beds, nice tents overtop, space for a hiding place underneath. It was an absolutely great theory. The boys would have their own beds, a cozy place to be by themselves, away from their brother. They would have their own bookshelf where they could keep their own things. And even if they’re a packrat like ONE OF MY CHILDREN, he could put everything he wanted to keep underneath, put the tent flap down, and unless I was really bullish about cleaning, I would never know. But the second we put those beds together from the tall IKEA boxes, two weeks after we moved here, I knew it was a mistake. The room just wasn’t big enough for anything besides the beds. We stumbled along with them (and often into them) for eighteen months, but as covid kept on coming, and as snow kept on falling outside, and as we ran out of places to go and things to do, it made less and less sense to have a room that was only usable for sleeping. So I listed the beds to sell, they were gone in a week, and we cleared everything out. We moved all the bookshelves to one wall and added one, plus a craft/Lego table, and kept everything else clear. Now two weeks after starting, we have something completely different, something that, most days, barely even resembles a bedroom. But in the past week, the boys have spent hours in there. They have jumping contests on their mattresses, they lean them against the wall for slides, they hide underneath. (Yes, they jump off the dresser onto a pile of Nugget cushions too.) They make forts and they come to blows over who gets what cushion, what mattress, which side of the room. They have changed their sleeping positions at least four times. The side by the radiator is warmer, but sometimes too warm. The side by the dresser has a nice little inlet between it and the wall, but it means people have to step on your bed to get clothes out. (Occasionally one will really mix it up by going longways along the wall.) They’ve split the time evenly, and in between when they have come to a…

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So We Hike

dananicoleboyer@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 14:46:54 +0000

Today, for New Year’s Eve, we went on a hike. Like we did two days ago, like we have been doing a couple months now. This is our thing these days; we go through the hiking book and we find one that looks fun or interesting, and we go hiking. It has become our way to get through the days in this strange, strange world; this world where we live in Europe but cannot travel it, where we have a wonderful school for the boys but as of next week, they will not be attending it. This place where we have made our way a bit, made friends and a community, but cannot see them. So we hike. Today, last week, last month. Then next week, and next month. And next year, I am sure. But today, it snowed. And today, the snow stuck. We’ve had a few flurries before, just enough to cover some windshields in the city streets below our apartment, enough to drift across some fallen leaves in the woods. But this morning, as if to wash this last year clean, it snowed for hours. This year, I never even bought the boys snow boots because the snow happens here so infrequently. Last year they wore their snow boots two times and then grew out of them, so this year they have been making do with winter hiking boots. And as far as snow activities go, my go-to growing up was sledding, which also requires extra equipment. And considering the ‘only essentials’ lockdown right now, where the stores are divided into open sections and closed sections that no one really understands, where clothes are not considered essential, but books are, our shopping is extremely limited. We have no way to get a sled. So on this white morning, so different and the same as the day before, we went to do what we’ve done. We picked a trail, we put on our hiking shoes, found a pair or two of mittens, stuck some candy in our pockets to get us through the halfway hiking whines, and we went to hike. Since it was colder than it has been this winter, and since we were not in proper footwear, and since this would be close to seven miles for the week, I set my expectations low. I figured the boys would make it a mile, and we would…

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On Leaning In

dananicoleboyer@gmail.com — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 10:20:45 +0000

In France, it takes seven hours by high speed train to cross the country; in Germany you can drive from France to the Czech Republic and hit nothing but Germany. Here in Luxembourg we can go an hour and a half north, forty five minutes east and west, and an hour south. Those are our boundaries in these Covid times; those are our borders for these strange days, weeks, months. Luxembourg is a beautiful country, and it’s small. And when there are no other places we can go, it begins to feel very small. So for us, and maybe this is the story for a lot of others as well in these times, it’s a season of appreciating what we already have. Our little trip to The Netherlands to show the boys the landscape of The Wheel on the School is out, the Louvre (after we scheduled wrong the first time) is out, the fairytale German castle Neuschwanstein is out. So many of the goals we had moving here have been on hold for months now, and it has been easy to get discouraged. So instead of moving outward, as we so often tend to do, we have been given no choice but to lean in, to move deeper into Luxembourg, appreciating the details, and enjoying what we already have. What makes that hard is that we had already done that a LOT; despite our grand dreams of traveling everywhere in Europe, so far most weekends we really have stayed here, and it has been starting to feel like there is a real, finite amount of things to see in this tiny country. So when we were at the local bookstore the other day, and Joe saw a Luxembourg hiking book of the 201 national circuit trails, we bought it. If we can’t go other places, we can still be here just a little bit better, in this place that we chose, with a little more knowledge, with a little more purpose. It’s been three weeks now, and some combination of us has done nine of the trails so far. We cross them off the list, we write the dates on the top, and we move on to the next trail. We’re seeing things that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise; we’re going to tiny small towns we never would have considered before. We’re going back to places we thought we…

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A Hike in Pictures

dananicoleboyer@gmail.com — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 15:32:32 +0000

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