love from Sicily

Well, we’re here!  Finally back in sweet Sicily, a lovely land that turned lush and green with autumnal rains in our absence.  Right now Elliott and I are in the library on base, enjoying the internet for the first time in 3 days.  Lena is crawling around as quickly as she can, smiling at the librarians and other visitors.  A couple just walked in that haven’t seen her in 4 months and stopped to marvel at how much she’s grown up.

Four months!  It has been 4 months since we first arrived on the island.  A month and a half in Sicily, and then two and a half months in the U.S. for Elliott’s training… and now we’re back at last to set up house here.

House.  Well, folks, you should see it.  It’s chaos right now.  We arrived in Sicily on Tuesday, slept for 12.5 hours that night in the hotel (!), and then on Wednesday morning the movers arrived with all our boxes.  They brought everything crate by crate (7 in all) to our front door, and each crate was strapped in the back of a little pick-up truck because that was the largest size of car that could make it up the narrow streets of our Italian town to our front door.  The entire process took from 9am-4:30pm because of the long lull between when each crate was finished and when the next one arrived.  We thought we were all set at about 3pm but then realized we were missing some “valuable items.”  The movers insisted we go through every box after that to find the valuable things, and we finally found them after we went through each box the third time.  Our house looks like a bomb exploded in it.  Gaaaah!  But at least we can live in this state for long, so it’s highly motivating for us to get moved in quickly.

Today Elliott and I made a huge dent in organizing our kitchen (the most important room in the house, of course) and it looks so much better.  I also met up with friends for a playgroup; it’s so good to see those friendly faces again and get back into the community.  We also did a massive grocery shopping trip and–

— sorry, Lena found someone’s hair clip on the library floor and was eating it.  Gross.  Rescued.

Anyway, life is up in the air right now.  We have no internet yet, which is why we’re at the library at 5:45pm.  I also have no cell phone, but that should change soon, we hope.  But we can see shepherds herding sheep on the hills from our bathroom window, and we heard a distant cock crow this morning as we woke up with the sunrise streaming into our bedroom.  I can watch horses graze and Mt Etna smoke gently from my enormous kitchen window.  We really are living in Italy.  It’s a dream.  It’s happening!