Quality of Life

I've been thinking about our quality of life here versus our quality of life back home.  I still haven't read The Blue Zone, but I've gotten the Cliff note version from friends.  A friend told me how Sardinia is one such blue zone place, where people live longer, healthier, happier lives.  I've always wanted to live a long time healthfully and happily (doesn't everyone?...well, no, I know some folks who have no desire to live a long life), perhaps fearful of death (reading/teaching The Stranger this week is not making me any more accepting of the inevitability of death at the moment), but mostly I've always thought, as my mom said a month or so before she died, "I just don't want to go anywhere."

In August and early September, it stayed light late and we ate gelato and enjoyed the sun.  One Thursday night...

[Clang clang bang bang.  Hannah: "Connor, you didn't tell me it didn't close!"  She volunteered to help him put out the plastic and metal recycling...they played their game of drop the bags of recycling down three flights of stairs, it seems.  Sorry, neighbors.  Perhaps we will find a sign that reads, "Please don't drop trash and recycling down the stairs" tomorrow.  Two weeks after the gang arrived in August, we noticed a typed-up sign on the inside of the front door of the building: "PLEASE DO NOT SLAM THE DOOR.  THANKS."  Mary and I cringed, and I said something like, "Oh, gosh, that's embarrassing."  Mary said, "Yeah, especially since it's for us: it's in English." ...we are hiding from my boss the damage we've already done to the apartment -- do all families with kids wreak havoc on homes? A four inch patch of paint on the living room ceiling peeled from slime Connor threw up high; some plaster falling from the wall in the dining room; curtains torn from curtain rods ("It was a mistake!  I was just pulling the curtain back!"); the light in the kids' bathroom pulled out of the socket and broken, and then, because someone turned the light on and left it on even after that, huge cracks through the mirror that the heat from that light formed.]

...one Thursday night Daniel said, Let's go out to dinner.  I went with the gang, but unhappily so.  I wanted to be home, and I was tired, and I had work to do (wherever you go, etc.).  And somehow the light had changed and it had gotten dark quickly, and I had missed the sunlight in its final hours.  That afternoon/evening, I was devastated by the sun's having disappeared on me.  I had the strange fear that it was not going to return or that I wasn't going to get to enjoy it the next day.  It was a fear that I had lost my chance.  The next morning when I pulled out the heavy door (with the don't slam the door sign), the sun greeted me.  I was so relieved, so grateful: it came back.

So I understand my mom.  I can't understand how it was to be her, knowing that she really wouldn't continue to see the sun, but I get her desire to stay.  Not to miss the sun.

So quality of life.  Doesn't it boil down to health and people and time and doing what you love?  And what makes a childhood good?  Is the quality of life for our kids better here or at home?  We get in the car for trips and for errands, but certainly not daily, and sometimes not even weekly.  Clearly this has to be better for us.  We sit longer at dinner.  The kids are happy at school for the most part.  Sebastian reports that the kids here are nicer than the kids at Plympton or at Thayer.  Mary is making friends in grade six and is able to swim and sew and still have time for baking and reading writing.  And I'm happy for these big kids to miss middle school in the U. S.  Connor is working on his pyramid at pottery.  Hannah is playing tag with the boys after school and soccer twice a week; she came for a short run with me this afternoon.  Connor is the only one who is clear that he wants this venture to be only one year: he's happy to be here, he says, and he is up for a one year adventure, not two.  The other three are happy to stay.  The question of whether to pursue staying, for me, comes down to their childhood. 

So quality of life.  Quality of childhood.

At home there's love.  There's good health.  There's purpose. There's friendship.  There's our neighborhood.

In Italy, there's love.  There's good health.  There's purpose. There's friendship.  There's time. 

But still.  Home is home.