Soft white snowflakes are drifting gently down from a grey sky and brightening every branch, twig, dead leaf and blade of grass they alight upon. It is the end of November, the beginning of winter, and the second seasonal change we have experienced since our arrival in Poland in an early August summer. Growing up in countries where four defined seasons created a regular pattern in our lives, we have both been deprived in recent years of the wonders each change brought with it, and now we feel like kids again. It is as if, at last, the final piece of the jigsaw has fallen into place.
Finding somewhere that we feel totally comfortable calling it “home”, after years of travelling to new pastures vainly scanning the windows of real estate agents and even getting to seriously consider a few of the offerings, is like opening the first page of a new book and just knowing one will read it effortlessly to the final word. After nearly two months sleeping beneath our new-found roof, we have finished reading the introduction, have raced through the preface and are most definitely ready to start on chapter one.
Metaphorical preliminaries over, I must admit the process has not been easy for me, an alien in a foreign land, unable to spout more than the most basic of conversational phrases, and totally reliant on Celine to carry all the burden of sorting through the bureaucracy that a house purchase entails. Nothing happened in quite the same way that it would have done “back home”, whatever home means to this wanderer who has spread his domestic life throughout England, Nigeria, Kuwait, Canada, England again and finally nine years in Southern California. The one constant factor of all those resting places was language, and now even that old stalwart has let me down. And all the while that we went searching for a nesting place “somewhere in Europe” we had both legally been “Europeans”, and of course that accursed Brexit has now made me an alien there as well. So that is yet another hurdle for me to overcome.
The day we first viewed the place that has now become home – first-, second- or only-home has yet to be decided – it was a fine sunny afternoon. We had breakfasted in our AirBnB digs a couple of hundred yards further up the hill, sharing our mealtime with a young deer feasting in the forest outside the kitchen window, and felt we were in paradise.
We walked down to the address and, being “american,” our first surprise was to find that not the realtor, but the owner was going to show us around. This is not the best way to give a dwelling the once over, for whatever you start to look at closely, be it a dodgy looking electrical socket or cobweb-filled cupboard in the basement, the owner immediately tries to offer an explanation or else to distract you by pointing to some more wholesome detail of her “wonderful home” on which she has of course spent a fortune in renovations. One thing that had made the on-line description extra enticing, was that the house was “fully furnished” and indeed there were a lot of very desirable items of furniture throughout; however it was not long into the visit that “Pani Householder” – formal Polish always uses the title Pani or Pan when addressing anyone other than good friends or family – started to offer various significant pieces, items that we later realised, were simply too big to be moved into her new smaller apartment, at “much less than she had paid for them,” or words to that effect, and things that she simply didn’t consider to be of much value she would “gift to [us]” because we were “such nice people”.
However, there were so many upsides to what we saw that first day that although we swore to each other that we would definitely not pay the list price unless all of the furniture was included, we realised that the house ticked nearly every box for us and we did eventually come to an acceptable agreement and after some partially successful bargaining we did end up with enough basic furniture to be adequately comfortable and were not quite as much out of pocket as the owner might have originally desired.
For a long time, our house-buying mantra had included a view of either water or hills, and to satisfy my own rather greedy list of wants, a dog and a dock, a garden and a garage. While we may not have achieved total satisfaction – I’m afraid the dog is out of the question until we stop travelling altogether and I had already abandoned the dock idea after a six month trial period of being a boat owner in SoCal – but we do have a view of forest and the local park, we live in the foothills of Gory Stolowe, we have a small garden with enough leaves to rake up each year to make a healthy supply of compost, a garage big enough to keep the snow off our rental car and the added bonus of a smaller “garage” that will, in due course, become a very satisfactory “man-cave” (US) or “garden shed” (UK).
Buying what is certainly, for the time being at least, a second-home entails a lot more thought than simply moving house along with everything that one already owns, as one is obliged to think like newly-weds furnishing their first home from scratch. So we made long lists of our basic needs, and then made trips to the nearest hardware store – Leroy-Merlin in Klodsko, a few kilometres away – and the inevitable long drive to the nearest IKEA in Wroclaw, where, after making a bevy of bedding purchases, we realised their standard bed sizes are slightly different from the European norm, not enough to be a real problem, but somewhat irritating to the uninitiated.
Finally, just five weeks and two days after our first viewing, the day arrived when we could collect the key to the door and really call the place home. And that was when the fun really began. Up until that day all our plans and suppositions about what would need to be put where had been just ideas in our heads, all the little jobs that we knew had to be done were simply a list in our new home’s notebook, and suddenly, we found ourselves hard at work. All day and practically everyday since, our new nest has been a hive of non-stop activity and as the remains of autumn passed us by and winter arrived, we realise we have not once been for a walk in the glorious woods above the town that we had so enjoyed when we first arrived in this pretty little spa town. As we started into one job after another, Leroy-Merlin practically became a second – or should that be third? – home, whilst we almost became part of the family at another French conglomerate, the hypermarket Carrefour, that was handily next door.
Now some two months later, there are no more empty picture hooks on the wall, let alone the ugly scars that accompanied them, new lights have been hung from ceiling fittings that were just bare wires upon our arrival, pockets of someone else’s old rubbish have been grubbed out and consigned to the dumpster, and cobwebs and their occupants no longer greet us at every turn; our inherited garden rake has been gainfully employed removing numerous barrow loads of the aforementioned leaves, our shrubs, grapevines and strawberry canes are now cosily hibernating beneath leafy mulch and half a dozen bags of same are ready to start off the compost heap in the spring. Celine has been scrutinising the net rigorously and every room is furnished appropriate to its purpose, as cosy rugs take root everywhere and the local delivery persons become our friends.
But as much as we feel truly “at home” in our new abode, our return “back home” to SoCal is imminent. There are so many aspects of our lives needing to be re-organised as we decide exactly how to live with this somewhat un-planned situation, that I can see the next few weeks and months being even busier than the last! I just hope I can still find time for some writing.
February in SoCal has arrived before I ever had a chance to post the above thoughts on our new life and the intervening two months have indeed proved to be just as busy as predicted. As soon as we arrived back in this “neck of the woods” or, more accurately, “pleasant little corner of suburbia”, there being no woods whatsoever in our immediate vicinity to compare with those we so recently left behind, we started thinking about all the things – cold weather clothing, “can’t do without” kitchen utensils, family heirloom crockery, useful handtools unused for years and yet so needed in our new home, and an extraordinary variety of odds and ends that would personalize and add extra cosiness – thereby creating yet another unforeseen problem, just how much should we consign away to our as yet only partly proven new life, and how were we going to ship it all? I even gave unwarranted consideration to the somewhat hairbrained idea of shipping our hybrid Kia o’er the pond, packed to the gills with our “household effects”, but a little research quickly indicated the practicality “cons” enormously outweighed the “pros” of such a rash manoeuvre.
Christmas festivities and slight health problems associated to my way of thinking with the change of environment, came and went and the New Year arrived, signalling that one quarter of our breathing space was gone without any decisions being made. Most importantly, I had to face up to the reality that my new status as an alien in our new European homeland, required some serious action to ensure our planned seven-month long return visit was not going to be upset by my only being in possession of the basic 90-day visa that comes with the territory of non-EU travellers. It has taken me much of the last month to bring together all that is needed to apply for a Polish National D-Type visa and having finally received that all-important document, this, dear readers, is where I shall close this post. Here’s hoping our eternal optimism bears fruit and we shall soon be on our travels gain, though this time, with the objective of completing the feathering of our new nest.
