Back to school

The girls went back to school last week and, today, I returned to work after a two-month sabbatical. To say that I am anything but sad would be a lie. This was the summer that the girls discovered Europe and art and countless flavors of gelato. This was the summer that we swam in the warm waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea and flew through the trees in Beaujolais. This was the summer that I fell in love with my family all over again.

On their first day back at school, Sophie and Anna were asked to share a memory from their summer. Sophie described cruising up the coastline of Capo Vaticano in our paddle boat with a slide. We spent an unforgettable day breathlessly paddling, laughing and sliding into salty blueness. Anna told her classmates about the enormous painting, Coronation of Napoleon, which hangs (more than 20 feet tall and 32 feet wide) in the Louvre. The painter, Jacques-Louis David, inserted Napoleon's mother prominently into the painting even though she had refused to attend the coronation ceremony. (Okay, come on, be impressed. How many first graders know that little tidbit of art history?)

If you ask them to talk about this trip, the girls will shyly recite the cities we visited and mention a few of the things we saw or did. Traveling for 5 weeks with the girls, I learned a few things of note as well (in no particular order):

* We should never take for granted how much language allows us to weave into the fabric of where we are. It took me a few weeks to realize how isolated we became as Americans abroad. The girls adjusted well enough, but I think they also clung to each other and to me more because the rest of the world seemed so very foreign. While we enjoyed the local culture (and certainly the local food!), after a full day of the French, the Italians or the Spaniards, we really just wanted to be together and ground ourselves in the familiarity of each other.

* There is something to be said for sleeping a full and uninterrupted night, waking when your mind and body are ready, and pacing yourself through an unscheduled day. It makes you do unexpected things, like let your children have gelato for breakfast.

* No one really needs to see more than one major piece of art a day. We spent a lot of time just taking in the local scene. The girls now know that they can go to a different country where they don't speak the language and enjoy themselves just fine. They will not be afraid of foreignness and they will be competent in navigating new places. They can go back for more of the Louvre when they're 20.

* The Daddy is the best toy ever. He plays chase better, yells "Marco Polo" louder, builds bigger sand castles and tickles without mercy.

* When asked about my favorite part of the trip, I remember quietly sitting under the ivy-covered arbor in Peggy Guggenheim's Venetian courtyard. We read chapter after chapter of Percy Jackson's mythical adventures on the cool stone benches. In some ways, we could have been reading anywhere, in any park, on any bench. Except we wouldn't have heard the splash of the speedboats along the canal, or looked up into the olive trees that line the old wall, or walked over to gaze curiously at Marini's The Angel of the City (yes, the girls giggled a lot over that). And we might have been bothered by cell phones or email or the distraction of cleaning our rooms. So, for those reasons, the Guggenheim courtyard was a magical, incomparable place.

When I first proposed this sabbatical, a few people exclaimed, "My God, just you and the girls for that long? You'll be exhausted! You'll need therapy! You'll be dying to get back to work to escape the doldrums of staying at home!" And I actually thought it might be true. Maybe the stress of foreign travel would wear me down, or the 24/7 with the girls would raise my blood pressure. Maybe I would start to lose my mind and drive the streets of Berkeley aimlessly searching for something to do (okay, I did do that in the last weeks of my leave).

But here's the thing: there's no such thing as getting tired of my family. They're like high fructose corn syrup (without the calories or tooth-rotting sugar). The more I get, the more I want. I am more bowled over by their jokes, more fascinated by their stories, more in need of feeling them snuggle up close. These last two months brought the rest that I so very much needed ("That's why they call it a sabbatical!" says my wise friend, Neil. "It's supposed to be a sabbath!"). But this time with Ed and the girls also brought back many of the touchstones that I had let float out a bit too far: my love of travel, art, literature, afternoon naps and unplanned days, all shared with them. So, as I return to work "rested and ready," I have to keep hold of these things and not squander the gifts of our adventure abroad.

This ends the chapter of our summer. We may be back from time to time when the girls find something "blogworthy" to report. Thanks for reading.