In the Beginning

Steve:

Do you ever wonder about how you are spending the days of your life?  I was sitting in grid locked traffic on Maryland Highway 270, in the middle of the morning crush.  I remember clearly it was on a Monday, or a Tuesday or a Wednesday, and it dawned on me, I was exactly where I had hoped I would never be.  In the middle of highway bedlam, slugging it out with the other commuters in a scenario that would repeat itself the next day, and the next and the day after that.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy my work, love my family and our home, and recognize that I am a very lucky guy.  Still, I couldn't help but wonder if there was some way of wresting control of my life back from whoever had it (certainly not me) and spending the majority of whatever time I have left on this planet in a way that is more of my choosing as opposed to what has been dictated to me by a certain set of circumstances.  What if we just picked up and moved to, I dunno, Positano Italy and spent our time enjoying each of our days rather than slogging through them?  I didn't think we could really do it on a permanent basis, but it seemed like a worthwhile experiment for at least a little while.  In my mind, dropping out of the rat race for awhile could give both my wife and I a chance to reconnect through the shared experience of life abroad and exposing the kids to a new culture and language.  And so the plotting began.

Years passed, our oldest daughter started kindergarten, our careers had their ups and downs, and still this idea persisted.  I was estimating what it would cost to take a family sabbatical somewhere and how long we could afford to do it.  As the kids got older, I realized if we didn't do it when they were relatively young the proposition would only get tougher.  Jo Anne (my spouse) and I discussed it on and off, but it never really took the shape of a hardened plan.  Then one sunny day last June I was summarily dismissed from my position at my company, which like so many companies in corporate America, has been going through the convulsions of a re-organization on an annual basis.  The termination came with a severance for my nearly 10 years of service, and while no one likes to get laid off (myself included), suddenly Positano didn't look so far away.  Our kids are now seven and five, so the timing seemed almost ideal.

Fast forward through two months of hectic planning and we are all on a plane to headed to Rome, where we would kick off our journey with three days of limited exploration (like I said, our kids are seven and five) through the ancient part of the city.  The first day was mostly sleeping, but we managed to take in Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain over the next two days.   While Samantha (my youngest) seemed to view it all as an exotic new playground (she continued to ask when we would get to Italy), Ella showed a genuine interest in the things she was seeing.  Later, her drawings of the Colosseum would be evidence of the impression it made on her.

The train to Naples was a short ride, and we arrived at our apartment in Positano last Saturday to begin our family sabbatical of nearly four months.  The apartment is a simple three bedroom with a beautiful view of the Mediterranean and the town of Positano.  The biggest negative is that we are on the main road, so there is a fair amount of traffic passing by at all hours.  We were so taken with the view when we first arrived, it seemed to muffle the noise from the street, but now that we have been here a week the noise seems to have regained it's footing.  Still, with a only a ten minute walk from the central plaza and the beach, we are content with our little casa.  And the owners were kind enough to gift us a bottle of homemade limoncello, the lemon liqueur that made Positano famous (in bars, at least.)

We have spent our first week establishing a fairly pleasant routine of school lessons in the morning, then heading to the beach for the afternoon for a swim and to lie in the sun.  The girls are negotiating the stairs without too many complaints, and only a mention of the word "gelato" usually suffices as enough of a bribe to head into town.  For Jo Anne and I, the difficulty has been to not eat every meal at one of the nearby  restaurants.  Not only is it too expensive, but in my mind we need to evolve from tourists to townsfolk at some point.  We'll see how successful we are in the coming weeks.  

For all of you who have taken the time to read this, we will try to keep the blog fairly current.  This is my first experience with a blog (reading or writing), so please forgive me if it isn't up to snuff.  

Enjoy your day, whatever it may bring.  

Ciao.