New adventure awaits

A few months ago, Ira was asked if he would like to be the next director of the Kenyon-Exeter study abroad program. Did he? Could he? If he did, could we all go? Oh, there were so many questions! We were excited. Nervous. Unsure. So, we did what we usually do when contemplating travel. Research. Lots of research. But this wouldn’t be just travel. This would be leaving our home for almost a year. Our son, currently in first grade, would have to leave his friends, his school, his activities. I would have to get approval to work remotely for the year. After much deliberation, we decided, yes.

But there were so many things we had to do. So much planning that needed to be done: find a place to live and a new school for your child, and what activities and trips to take students to. We researched so many primary schools for our son. Visited many websites, read every report and review. So much information. Without an address, it was hard to narrow down the choices. Without an address, we felt adrift with nothing concrete to envision what our year would be like. This reminded us of how necessary it is to have a home, even one for a year, a place to come back, a place which was ours.

In our marriage, Ira is a dreamer. It comes with his profession of a writer. Often, he would look dreamy and say, “I have this idea” and I would roll my eyes and say, “What now?” I am the practical partner in this relationship. The one who collected data and made spreadsheets, who thought about the steps of Ira’s “ideas.” It makes our partnership perfect in a way, though definitely not equal. Dreaming is easy; putting it all together, thinking realistically and logistically, is so much more work.

The first step: find a home.

Let me start by saying we have found email to be the worst way to communicate. We didn’t get any response, even from the suggested letting agencies we were given from the University of Exeter. So we moved onto AirBnB. Ira started contacting the ones that looked promising and by that we mean more than one bed, but not meant for 10 people. But none of them wanted to contract for the 10 months that we would be there. We grew frustrated. Our anxiety ratcheted up. At one point, Ira said, “I’m done.” I was close, too.

Then something funny happened.

I contacted a woman with a cottage on AirBnB, even though Ira had tried and failed a few weeks earlier, and she took pity on us and agreed to un-list her cottage and make it available for us long term. Apparently, she had traveled overseas not long ago and ran into the same problem before someone took pity on her; she wanted to pay it forward. Her kindness was just what we needed. Kindness is what the world needs.