Advent

This is what last year's Advent wreath looked like. We got it at the German Christmas market at SHAPE. In case we neglected to tell you, Germans do Christmas up right. And the Germans at SHAPE are no exception. To make sure no one has to go without their Christmas market, they take over the high school cafeteria and transform it into a magical wonderland of yummy things to eat and drink and these hand-made wreaths, which the German ladies put together. These wreaths are so popular that people - us included - race to get there as soon as the market opens because they sell out so quickly.

This year - maybe because we spent Thanksgiving week in Texas - Advent crept up on me and I was totally unprepared. At some point in our movings - either before we went to Belgium or before we returned - I apparently dismantled our trusty old wreath that had, admittedly, seen far better days. So this is all I could dig up from the bowels of the basement:

Pretty sad, huh? I think I need to go back to Belgium...

And The Paint Goes On

When we left our house in February 2007 the painter was in the process of painting most of it off-white. The walls in our house in Hautrage were all white. We came home craving color. We were also very taken by the color schemes we saw in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, where vivid reds and yellows were highlighted. So we decided to try our own little Schönbrunn combo in the dining room.

The pictures are a little fuzzy but you get the idea. The framed item on the wall to the left of the china cabinet is a piece of embroidery we picked up in Bratislava. I loved the colors and the craftsmanship. It was only later that I got so attached to our neighbors' goats, so it is purely coincidental that this is a picture of a goatherd and some of her charges.

This big baby is a depiction of the Doudou festival in an earlier century. We knew we wanted this to be the centerpiece of the dining room because it's a huge poster. Plus the Doudou is like the center of culture in Mons. On the right-hand wall are three plates and a tile, more souvenirs from our travels. I didn't go about selecting them with this color scheme in mind but they all match beautifully. That is probably not coincidental, since I just like red.

Since this is a holiday weekend for us, I'm set to tackle another painting job: the kitchen. This one won't turn out as dramatic. Our primary objective for this project is lightening the eat-in part of the kitchen, which, after our fabulously large, light and airy kitchen in Hautrage, is dark and small. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Life in Suburbia

Seen today strolling through our backyard: five deer, followed a few minutes later by three more.

When we went out to walk about 10 minutes later, six of them were grazing in a front yard down the street, unfazed by a dog being walked by.

Transitions

We've been back in the US for over three months now, and back at work for about 6 weeks. We've adjusted to some things quite well, like stores that stay open in the evening and on Sundays, although I do find myself wondering occasionally if a particular store - like David's barber, for instance - will be open on Monday. We love having reliable electrical service in our home, but, again, sometimes when we drive up to the house and haven't quite hit the garage door opener squarely and the door doesn't open, we both suck in our breath while thinking, "Oh crap, the power's out again" until we realize that that was a Belgian phenomenon. Still, we don't realize how much of life in Belgium we had internalized as normal until we are startled by the realization that normal is different here.

One transition that has been harder has been going back to work. Not just the getting up, getting dressed, and slogging through traffic part, but adjusting to a different job. It's not a new job, since it's one I did before going to Belgium, but I find that my experiences at SHAPE and working with the military have changed me in ways I'm not even really conscious of. Maybe I just like working with guys in uniform. Whatever...Without going into any detail, I'll just say that I'm still looking for what excited me about this job in the past.

On the home front, we had another light-bulb moment this weekend. Sarah was off having a girls' weekend with friends so we found ourselves home alone in our house for the first time since coming back. Between the gorgeous fall weather - temperatures which resemble those of summer in Belgium - and the knowledge that it was just the two of us (oh boy, we can eat in front of the TV!), we realized that maybe some (or a lot) of what we liked so much about our life in Hautrage was not so much being in Belgium but just being empty-nesters. After all, we'd had little empty nest time between Sarah's departure for college in fall 2006 and our departure for Belgium in February 2007 - and in those few months we'd had kitchen/bath remodelers crawling all over the house. So while we're happy to have our little girl here until she can get her own apartment, we are definitely looking forward to the peace and quiet and uncluttered living that comes with having raised your kids and seen them go out on their own.

Lessons

This doesn't really have anything to do with our big Belgian adventure, so if that's all that interests you, you can stop reading now.

Lately I find myself worshiping and hearing homilies through the prism of our nephew Emmett's battle with cancer. Last week in North Carolina we heard about healing from a priest who had been diagnosed three years earlier with terminal bone cancer. While he didn't say that he was cancer free, he was indeed still here three years later, thankful for the power of the prayer offered by his friends and relatives.

Today in my home church in Columbia one of our favorite preachers - in the sense of one we like to hear preach - encouraged us to engage in persistent, passionate, and purposeful prayer. He led us through the following three utterances:

- My persistent prayer will be answered;

- My passionate prayer will be answered;

- My purposeful prayer will be answered.

Perhaps my mind is striving to see a connection between these two church experiences, a connection that speaks strongly to me of hope. I want to interpret this hope as God speaking to me about Emmett. As Emmett prepares to participate in a new treatment trial, I hope that this hope and he are connected, and not just in my mind.

She forgot the best part

We drove our new diesel VW on its first extended trip: 52 mpg. That's 4.5 kg/hectare in metric.

Rediscovering Scenic America

If any of you are still checking our blog after our two-month hiatus, here's for you:

Last week we drove out to a farm in rural Howard County to pick up a whole bunch of green beans to freeze. We drove through some beautiful rolling hills featuring farms, valleys, streams, and winding little roads that Esmerelda the GPS would have loved. The scenery reminded me of some of the areas near our Belgian village that we had grown to love, and I felt like I had my little piece of Belgium right here in HoCo, complete with cows and horses and sheep (no goats though).

Later in the week we drove through the Shenandoah Valley down to the mountains of North Carolina through miles and miles of farmland, forested mountainsides, and deep valleys with clear streams. If I tried, I could make myself think Germany. I didn't need to, though, because I was OK with this being our country and our scenery. I thought about what Europeans must see - besides magnificent autumn leaves - when they drive through the Shenandoah: a vastness that speaks of the incredible size of our country, the fact that we drove for 8-9 hours and never left the Eastern part of the US. How do Belgians and Luxemburgers even process a country of that magnitude?

Back to those leaves: between Thursday, when we went South, and Monday, when we returned north, there had been a lot of change: lots of orange and yellow with some red sprinkled in. It was gorgeous.