Rainy London

It's been raining. Along with that wind, we had a helluva lot rain this weekend.
Pouring really.
It ruins stuff when it just keeps raining.
We were going to walk to the movies on Saturday night. It's a nice, half-hour walk to our local cinema, all flat, all along the high road.
London's pretty much all flat, which is really good for walking and cycling.
Anyway, couldn't do that, had to drive and hassle for a parking space, because it was just coming down in buckets when we went out to go.
And then it proceeded to come down pretty much all night long.
The last two mornings when we've woken up it's been pouring too. Rain pelting our attic bedroom windows.
This morning, not wanting to get up and not having to work, I worried about my son walking to the Tube station since all he has is one of those small black, collapsable umbrellas (the kind I keep losing ) -- and he's a big guy.
But then it actually stopped raining for a few minutes right when he had to walk to the station, so he was good.
And then it finally cleared up this afternoon. After two solid days of rain.
That's the thing here.
You give up hoping that it will clear up.
You don't give it a chance really.
Once it starts raining like that, you just think that's it.
And giving up hope is never good.
Because at a certain point, it actually does stop raining.

Wind

It's been blowing a gale here, folks.
Serious wind.
And it's changed our night life for the past few days.
Our bedroom is the attic of this old house. It's got three big windows carved into the roof.
It's our favorite room in the flat. It's what convinced us to rent the place. The room is big and flooded with light from the three windows.
I love having the windows open up there, and since it's generally the warmest place in the house, at the top there, that's not a problem. The windows are new and wooden and swivel all the way around, so they're easy to keep clean (gotta have clean windows here).
Out of the biggest of the three, while we're lying in bed, we watch the planes flying in and out of Heathrow -- and just the sky, really, which usually has quite a show going on here.
Out another, you see the gabled tops of the identical row of old houses across the street. And from the third, the back line of a row of brick houses from above, with their neat back gardens -- all tidy, symmetrical and equal.
When it rains, the rain plops right on top of the windows, right above you somehow. So you always know when it's raining if you're up there.
I like to have one particular window open at night.
But lately, it's just been too windy.
For the first time since we got here.
Blowing a gale.
The wind has been rattling the door of our bedroom, which one night, woke us up all night long until finally, we figured out we had to shut ourselves in to make it stop.
It also jars the two little trap-like doors to the loft, a big storage area, another reason we thought this flat wasn't too bad when we rented it.
I can feel the wind dropping now, after several days.
Good.
We can have the window open tonight.

Thanksgiving

Doesn't feel like Thanksgiving at all.
If we were home, the turkey would be roasting in the oven now, filling the house with its aroma. TV would be on, with football on its way.
The boys would be lying around the living room, waiting for the big chow-down, on their lap-tops, listening to their iPods -- the usual. Lots of Thanksgivings, we had guests. My husband and I would both be off work, in the kitchen.
Instead, I'm here alone in our kitchen, writing to you. My husband's at work. And my son's at his internship.
I could've done it myself, mind you. I mean I'm off, so I could've cooked a turkey and the three of us could've had it when they got home from work. My husband's coming home pretty early today, too, so he could've still done a lot of it, which he does brilliantly. (The Brits are amazing at roasting. That's their thing.)
But when my son said some young Americans from work had invited him to go out with them to a Thanksgiving do and did we mind if he went because he kinda fancied it, we really didn't.
But when he set off this morning in his football jersey (yes, he wore a Redskins jersey to work. But I think it's okay, because it is an American company, and Thanksgiving is nothing without football, as every American knows), the memories of Thanksgivings past came flooding back.
He was all excited though. At 23, you do not get bogged down by nostalgia. At least he doesn't.
And he knows people in the office will be talking to him just because he's wearing it. Which is always kinda fun. He can talk about the Redskins all day -- and how shitty they're playing this year.
My husband and I might go have sushi tonight.
It's our anniversary, if you can believe that. At least the one we celebrate. The day we met, and started dating.
31 Thanksgivings ago today.
My God. What we've been through.
He didn't know what Thanksgiving even was that day. He just got invited by an American woman we both knew and turned up in the evening, hours beyond when we ate, with a bunch of other people prepared for some big American "nosh-up," as he says.
Most of the food was gone by the time he got there.
But I was still there.
31 years.
An eternity.
Our entire lives.
And this has been our hardest year.

I admit it

Okay, it's official. I'm depressed.
Why else would I be sitting here writing to you at the crack of dawn? And often awake and panicked at the first break of light?
And anyway, if a guy says it, it must be true, right?
Read a moving first-person story yesterday in one of the British newspapers about a successful writer, husband and father of four kids who fell into a deep depression after moving to a big house in the country. (Not another country, folks, just THE country. I bet he still kept his car and his sofa.)
Anyway, it was a lovely, poignant story, because he told the truth. How he was embarassed to admit it, because so many people are dealing with huge economic issues now (like getting kicked out of their houses) and life-threatening illnesses.
I know exactly what he meant. That's how I've been feeling.
Not wanting to admit how I feel to anybody, making it feel even worse and more isolating, because, yes, people are dealing with life-threatening illnesses.
And I know my life-threatening illnesses. I buried two elderly parents not that long ago (by myself, pretty much) and saw my husband through one. I was on a first-name basis with my local hospital for quite awhile back in the States.
So yeah, that's such a hard battle, I know.
So I apologize to anyone who's reading this who has a life-threatening illness. I'm so sorry for your pain.
But then he wrote about his symptoms.
How he felt he had lost his moorings, how the rug of stability and comfort had been pulled out from under him.
Yep. That's my flying carpet that's never gonna land feeling.
How he woke up panicking every morning, and crying.
Yep. Yep.
How his heart raced in anxiety and fear for the future, particularly in the early morning.
Check.
How he felt there was no escaping it, no out.
How he withdrew from people he knew who probably wanted to help.
Check. Check. Check.
So. Now what?
The guy in the story had a complete collapse one night and his (loving and supportive) wife took him to the GP, where they put him under the care of a psychiatrist, and got him on the happy meds.
And then slowly he began to feel better. And now he's much better, seeing the joy in his life again. And that's why he was writing the story.
I could feel a book coming as I read. Why is it that millions of women are depresssed and it's just normal everyday shit and then when guys admit it, you can feel the six-figure book advance check landing as you read?
Is male depression somehow more dramatic? Or is it just that when they admit it, just that fact in itself is book-worthy?
Anyway, he was advocating the meds, to help one get over the hump, just for awhile, to jump-start your brain.
Don't want to go on any meds.
Think that my problem is situational.
Gave up too much.
For too little in return.
Don't like it here enough.
Too old to waste time living in places I don't like that much.
Want to get going with creating my next life in a place I want to create it. In my own house that I can make nice, like I like to do.
That's got a living room big enough for a Christmas tree -- and my two sons.
Get a car. Get a comfy sofa. Get a life.
I don't know. Stop feeling like this.

Another umbrella?

How many umbrellas can one person lose?
I mean really.
I'm up to about half a dozen now.
All little, collapsable black ones -- the ones that slip in your handbag.
Because you've got to have an umbrella here. Because you never know when it's going to be raining.
And despite what I said about it not raining that much (which it actually hasn't, in British terms), it still feels like it's rained a helluva lot. For me anyway.
But then I'm Italian.
Where it's hardly rained at all.
I keep leaving them on the Tube mostly. Or at the station, I guess, when I'm reading my free paper.
Even though I always tell myself when I put the dripping thing down, that this time, I'm just not going to forget it.
But then I do.
Geez.
And no way can you carry a big umbrella around all day.
So gotta get another one, just like all the other ones.
Before I realized that they sell them everywhere -- and that the price fluctuates madly -- I paid £14 for one, which is about $20. Lately, I was down to about £4.
When I got off work today, it was raining. Well, drizzling really. And it's a 10-minute walk to the Tube either way. So I got wet.
When I stepped outside the building and noticed it was raining, I told another woman standing there bundling up about how I keep leaving umbrellas everywhere.
And how I was friggin' sick of it.
She said I gotta go to the lost and found at the Tube station and tell them I've lost a black collapsable small umbrella.
They'll have hundreds of them, she said.
No problem.

Spin it dry, baby

America is the land of dryers.
Dryers. Just the word could make me orgasm.
If you don't have a dryer in the States -- and you're 55 years old like me -- boy, are you down on your luck.
Even some of the shittiest rentals have dryers in the States. And people always have access to a dryer somewhere -- at the laundromat, their apartment building's communal dryers, their mommy's house, wherever they're doing their laundry.
Because a dryer is fundamental to doing laundry in the States.
Not here.
Some people I know here have dryers -- but choose not to use them.
Imagine that. In a damp country like this.
Unthinkable where I come from.
In Italy, people don't have dryers either. But there, they have sun.
We've got what they call a washer-dryer in this flat.
Does both. Sure.
When I told one of my American friends, she said, "yeah, a washer-dryer. Doesn't wash; doesn't dry."
Ha ha ha.
Tried the drying cycle once. It involved water, as far as I could tell, which seemed counter-intuitive. But what do I know?
Clothes came out like shit. Didn't use it again.
Wash everything on the delicate cycle. That seems to come out the best.
And then hang it up on a clothes dryer in the spare room.
Need to do a load almost every day with the three of us.
One, because some of the stuff takes a couple days to dry.
Two, because there's not a lot of room on the clothes dryer. (Or the spare room).
I also drape jeans and sheets and towels and bathmats all over the banisters for all those steep steps we've got. You should see the place when I wash the sheets. Looks like a gypsy camp.
Would love to stay and chat with you.
But just heard the washer click off.
Gotta hang today's load.

British stairs

Are the knees the first to go?
My knees feel creaky. It can hurt to walk up the steep stairs in our flat here.
We have two sets of steep steps, one as soon as you walk in to get to the main level of the apartment and then another set leading to our attic bedroom.
This morning, before dawn, I slipped down the stairs from our bedroom as I was coming down to turn the heating down. I was hot.
And I slipped. And I'll get bruises on the back of my thighs.
Anyway, I may be getting too old for steep steps.
The house we were lucky to have sold in the States was all on one level -- a rambler. Our bedroom, the kitchen, the living room, dining room, kids' rooms -- all on the same floor. Downstairs was the basement and the laundry room. After the boys' left for college, days would go by without us going down there.
I remember when we bought it, 12 years ago, my husband liked it because it was all on one floor, saying it's easy to be all on one level.
I remember thinking that was absurd at the time, considering we were in our early 40s with school-aged boys. And then I kinda hankered after a Colonial, with its stairs right when you walk in.
Now, that we've sold our house, and we live in a flat with not one, but two sets of steep steps (why?), I know what he means.
It was really nice to be on one level.
I miss it.
And I think it's my future.

Don't Know Anything

Today I feel the exact opposite about working.
I feel tied down now, like I can't go to Italy anymore for very long, because I have to work two days a week here at a freelance job in London, a job that really is a helluva lot worse than the job I used to have in the States.
But I guess I'm lucky to have anything, right? And I need the money, right?
But two days a week is hardly anything.
But then maybe it's too much.
I don't know.
I don't know anything.
I used to know stuff.
Every since I moved here, I know nothing.
I don't know what to do.
I don't think I'm happy here.
But I have no idea what to do about it.
I don't know anything anymore.

Working

I've said it before. I'm going to say it again.
Working makes you feel good.
It gives you a purpose. And if work is good, it makes life better, fuller.
But if you work too much, or if work isn't good, it takes over. And stresses you out. And makes you sick. And leaves no time for anything else.
Not good.
So it's all about getting the right balance. And maybe not caring that much.
This may be my chance to get it right. If I play it right.
Maybe.
I just finished my two day's work this week. Work was good, but the Tube journey was hard both days. Trains delayed, lots of squishing and waiting for the next train.
This morning, my son and I got there late after our train died. And they had to send another. Commuting is often hard.
So I've had actually had enough for this week, if truth be told. Even though another day's money would certainly come in handy.
Tomorrow, there's old ladies yoga at the same place that does the old ladies pilates. So may do that.
Nice to have the day off when everyone's working.
But then nice to work too.
You don't enjoy your time off if you're always off.
They want me to work a bit more the next month, to cover for a colleague who's going back to the States for an extended vacation.
So I'll average three days a week this coming month. Three days may be the magic number.
But then I'm going to take a month off, I told them.
My youngest is coming for 10 days at Christmas.
And then I'm going to Italy to settle my eldest in for his Rome internship.
Really want to spend some time in Italy now. Been away almost two months now, which feels like a lot. Left precipitously when my freelance job unexpectedly emailed.
Working.
Can't live without it. Can't live with it.

The British High Street

There's something about a British high street that can lift any mood.
At least our high street can.
It's always a bustle of people. Hurrying along, in and out of the many cute little shops, picking up dinner, dry cleaning, flowers, going to and from work -- it's always full of folks.
And colorful.
A lot of restaurants, cafes and bars have tables outside -- and it's not like they give up on it in the winter.
Far from it.
Brits still sit outside whenever they can. In Italy, they've long brought the tables in.
Here, they've just put the outside heaters on overhead.
I'm wondering how long the restaurant and cafe tables will stay out. All winter? Nobody seems to have brought theirs in yet. And we've had gales blowing a couple days.
Anyway, besides the tables, there's always the fresh fruit and veg shops and stands that always display their bounty beautifully in baskets outside. With big bunches of fresh flowers nearby.
The high street just goes on for miles.
London is just one high street after another, linked together, one little village after the other.
Ours is really cute. We have a lot of adorable shops (expensive though usually). I notice a different one every time I walk down it. Lots of chain stores and restaurants too, but cute nevertheless.
This afternoon I walked to a Thai grocery store about a mile away that sells all Asian produce. I've found yummy Chinese dumplings there that you can steam at home.
Picked up some of those.
I love that you can get everything you want just right outside on the high street. Convenient too, since don't have a car anymore.
So, had a lovely long walk. It's all flat around here, which helps.
Million people out. All doing their thing.
Makes you feel part of things.

English rain

So much for it not raining much. Made up for it this weekend.
We had 80 mph gales and lashing rain for about 24 hours.
The big windows in this old house rattled and the inside doors banged and strained against the wind. Big raindrops plopped on our bedroom attic windows all night long, sometimes in a torrent, other times slow and fat.
No wonder Turner, so good at painting gales and massive waves and horizontal rain, was British. (Saw the Turner show yesterday at the Tate gallery near Westminster).
What other nationality could he have been?
I don't mind big weather like that.
It sweeps over the British isles and then goes on its way somewhere else.
It's the drizzle that drives me nuts.
When you don't really know if it's raining or not.
Well you do. But you don't want to admit it.
After the big rain, the drizzle set in.
My son and I were out in it.
I only had a big umbrella, which is stupid, of course, but I had misplaced my little one (or my three little ones) that fit into my bag.
For me, it was definitely raining.
When your hair is getting wet, and you're a woman, it's raining. Pretty simple.
All the women on the high street were under umbrellas, although admittedly their umbrellas were about a third of the size of mine.
My son insisted it wasn't raining.
Fine.
All the men in the street seemed to not be under umbrellas, shielding themselves behind flimsyly-upturned collars or pulled-up sweatshirt hoods instead.
This is a basic difference between men and women. Umbrellas.
Anyway, since my umbrella was so huge, I had to walk significantly behind my son -- or risk putting one of his eyes out.
And my hair got wet anyway -- and so quickly looked like shit -- because it got wet before I put my umbrella up.
While I too was saying it wasn't raining.

Friday night

The Tube is such a strange creature.
You never know what it's going to be like.
Are you going to be squished like a sardine, with your back up against the doors, like my son and I were going into town the other day? Or are you going to get to sit down and read your free paper in peace?
Hard to predict.
Do not see rhyme or reason to it yet. Depends on how quick the trains come basically, which is something way beyond knowing.
Here's one little guess on the situation: The Friday night commute home, which I just did, is less busy, because people stay in town and go to the pub to start their weekends. Central London is packed.
The Brits are nothing without their drink. More about that later.
Back to the Tube. Which is very pretty, really. Some of the stations are art deco gems. Love the way they light the brick archways at Gloucester Road station.
Anyway, yesterday afternoon and today up and back to work, the Tube was a delight. Sat down the whole way; enjoyed the free paper. Love the free Evening Standard.
That coming right after yesterday morning, though, when my 6'5" son was pinned against the sliding door for several stops. By the sheer crush of commuters.
With his neck bent over like a giraffe.
It was kinda comical.
At one point, a tiny woman managed to push in behind him at one stop, about half his height.
He couldn't turn around and his back-pack just grazed her head.
"Is there someone behind me?" he whispered at one point.
Yep. There is.

The NHS -- again

I hate to go on about the NHS, the socialised National Health Service, here, but it really does seem good to me.
A British girlfriend of mine called tonight to say her mother had fallen and broken her hip -- and her wrist -- a couple weeks ago.
The day after her 90-year-old mother fell, they gave her a hip replacement at the hospital.
The day after. And she didn't pay a dime. (Okay she did in contributions, as my husband keeps telling me).
They came and got her in an ambulance, like they do, and took her to the hospital, and bright and early the next day, a new titanium hip.
Because you shouldn't wait too long when you've broken a hip like that.
What?
My elderly mother broke her hip in the States a few years ago now.
It took us about a month to get a hip replacement for her. And the bills that came from the ambulance service the night she fell were overwhelming.
Ambulance service wasn't covered by Medicare.
I know several people who have returned to Britain from abroad because they have either chronic health issues that need taking care of, or their children do.
No other place to be, really, when you're in that position, and you're British.
The good 'ol National Health.
Nothing like it for what ails you.

The Eldest

My son is starting to make a life here.
Baby steps, anyway.
He's been here about six weeks now.
This internship has helped a lot. There's been work to go to in central London every day, of course, and he's met a few people he likes there. It's a young, lively office.
He's enjoyed the actual work too. They've given him quite a bit of real work, for an internship, work he's enjoyed and been good at. He's gotten good feedback. He's learned new skills.
There's been some extra-curricular events to go to as well, in the evening, which has also been fun.
The busier the better. After a few weeks of not much.
They've asked him to stay on a couple weeks longer at the end, a chance he jumped at, since there were two dead weeks before his younger brother comes for Christmas.
Our youngest is coming, only for ten days unfortunately -- he's got late finals and then wants to be home by New Year's Eve with his friends.
But then, my oldest and I are planning on going to Italy.
To settle him in for this next internship that he's gotten, the one in his field of study, the one in Rome.
The six-month paid one that could, just maybe, lead to a permanent job. If he does well. If the economy picks up.
We haven't heard anything more from them, but we're staying confident.
Even in the midst of a deluge of stories about how recent college graduates are facing the toughest job market in years.
I still can't believe that my eldest son, 24 next month, who just graduated from college in May in the States, is going to go live on our side of the hill -- and commute to a job, okay internship, in Rome.
It's a hike. You have to leave an hour to be sure to get there on time. But he can drive the clunker I just bought.
But he has no friends there.
But he will be working in Rome.
I'll stay for a couple weeks, then I'll come back to London -- to be with my husband, to continue working myself. If I don't, my own freelance job will disappear.
And then he'll be there. Alone at our Italian house. In a little town, on a side of a hill in central Italy. While we're here.
Is this what we were hoping would happen if we moved back to Europe?
Is this going to work out?

Celebrity Sighting Number 2

I've had my second London celebrity sighting.
Not as big as seeing Colin Firth waiting around to pick up take-away at my local sushi place, for me, anyway, but pretty big in my 23-year-old son's eyes.
We caught a long glimpse of JLS, the cool British boy band that came out of X Factor, Britain's version of American Idol, on Sunday. They've had two UK chart-topping singles recently, "Beat Again," and "Everybody in Love."
So pretty cool.
And they were having lunch, like us, at the Wagamama noodle chain at Westfield Shopping Center.
Westfield is a story in itself, Europe's biggest mall, here in West London, just celebrating its one year anniversary, having opened its expensive doors right about the time Lehman collapsed last year. I'll tell you about that another time.
Back to Wagamama.
Two young British girls sitting near us tipped us off that someone important was amongst us. One of them suddenly stood up and snapped a photo with her cellphone of a far corner of the restaurant.
Then all of a sudden, like the dominos at the Berlin Wall celebrations yesterday, other people stood up and snapped photos too.
"JLS," the girl answered excitedly when we asked her who it was.
Later, the band left just as we left, even though we didn't plan it. So my son actually ran into one of the four of them near the door.
You do have more celebrity sightings here. I'm not sure why.
Washington doesn't have that many celebrities, of course, although some do breeze through town now and again.
It's mostly a government town.
Karen Hughes, one of President Bush's closest advisers, rented a house near me for awhile actually, and that felt celebrity-like. Before 9/11, I saw her sitting outside with her husband and teenage son having a beer after work a couple times. She moved after 9/11, I heard.
That's the kind of celebrities you got in Washington.
Here, Colin Firth lives in my neighborhood. Although I'm sure he's got "a pile", as they say here, or even two or three, in other places.
Anyway, he looked completely at ease when I saw him a couple weeks ago. No body guard or anything. Just on foot with an Italian friend.
These guys looked pretty normal too, just hanging out at the mall on a rainy Sunday afternoon. We saw two of them going up the escalator together a bit later.
Are there less paparazzi here?
Less crazies?
More celebrities living here? What is it?

Starbucks

I love that they give you your cappuccino in a real cup here.
Even at Starbucks.
Why don't they do that at home?
They don't ask you at home if you're staying, or taking your overpriced coffee out, because they always just give it to you in a styrofoam cup with a plastic lid whatever you're gonna do with it.
It's so much nicer in a real cup. It makes it an occasion. And you don't mind forking over $5 quite as much.
This morning, I stopped at Starbucks, for almost the first time.
There's a real anti-Starbucks thing here, and I understand it.
They're squeezing out, other, smaller chains. And that pisses people off.
In this recession, they've taken over leases of smaller coffee shops that have gone bust.
At home, I used to go to Starbie's all the time. It was really the only place TO go to get a reliable cappuccino. Or espresso.
Here, there's lot of coffee places.
But they're not all good, I've found. At all.
Not that I think Starbuck's is that good.
I think Italian coffee is good.
But this morning, hate to admit it, had a nice cappuccino -- right temperature, right amount of milk in proportion to coffee -- at Starbie's this morning. In a nice mug.
With a yummy almond croissant. On a plate.
Sitting at the window, looking out at the high street, reading my paper for half-an-hour.
Quite civilized.
Is is that hard to wash a few mugs?

The News from Home

To: President Barack Obama
From: An American Expat in London -- and the side of a hill in Italy (not much lately)
Re: Guns

Barack, you gotta do something about the gun situation at home.
Because we're always shooting each other there. In great numbers.
When we're crazy.
It's horrific.
And it's become our signature overseas, which is horrible. Stories about shootings in the States -- even a relatively small shooting, like yesterday in Orlando -- get huge play here, because it reinforces our stereotype.
Bunch of crazies. With guns.
But people are crazy everywhere, Barack. You know that. Despairing, barely getting through it. Don't know how people do get through it actually. And now especially, with so much sorrow around.
The difference is, in the States, you can just go get a gun and shoot people when you can't cope anymore. Which you can't in most places. Which you shouldn't be able to do.
Simple as that.
I covered the shootings at Virginia Tech University at my old newspaper job. The shooter there was simply crazy. No doubt about it.
The firepower he amassed was also simply shocking, someone as disturbed as that college kid was.
And now Fort Hood. Another horrific mass shooting.
By another crazy. At the end of his tether.
Barack, can we just try limiting people's access to lethal weapons used only to kill other people?
I mean, let's just try it and see if that helps at all.
Please.

The Lonely Commuter

Can you feel really alone when you're squished in like a sardine with thousands of other people?
In the Tube at the evening rush.
A huge crush. 'Cause my second train took about 15 minutes to come -- an eternity at that time -- and the people just stacked up a dozen deep waiting.
And then it came, packed to the sides with commuters.
Took more than an hour to get home.
It's a rickety old Tube line we're on. Everyone in London knows it.
Whew.
Is this my life now?
That's the end of my two days work, which this evening, as I waited on the cold platform, I was quite glad about.
But, I'm not working again until the last two days of next week, which is awhile away.
Financially. And otherwise.
I'll do too much housework in the meantime, which seems like a real waste of my life.
But someone's gotta do it. And who feels like paying for it now.
I could start on all the things I want to do with the rest of my life, of course.
What were they again?
Uh oh. They seem big. How do I get started?
I can write more to you, of course.
But you never write back.
So what is the point?

Where to Go

I still feel so disoriented here.
Been here just over eight months now, although I did spend a lot of time in Italy this summer.
Been working my freelance job a couple days a week now. That's what it looks like they'll want for now, a couple days a week. Not a week in a row, as I was thinking, and I guess hoping, but a couple days each week.
Anyway, it's something. Quite good, considering the shitty global job scene for journalists.
My son's working there too, as an intern, just for a few weeks, which is surreal.
Working with my son?
We go by Tube together there.
Lots of newfound togetherness for us. We haven't lived together for the past five years, since he went to college.
At work, we freelancers and interns, sit at different computers each day, "hot-seat", as they call it, which is disorienting in itself.
This afternoon, I found myself sitting across from my son for a few hours.
What?
What am I doing here?
I don't know. I've traded down in every aspect of my life -- my job, my house, financially.
Why?
I don't know. Italy was part of the reason. But when I'm here, and not there, it's hard to remember that. But my son is allegedly moving there at the end of this year. We hope anyway.
My job in the States was disappearing. They've had two buy-outs since I left. I'm hearing it's not that much fun there for those who are left. I could've gone to work somewhere else there though.
Do I want to stay here?
Really not sure.
We were going to look at it after a year. A year's not that far away now.
Don't like living in a rented flat. But not sure I want to buy anything here. Don't have the money for a deposit on a nice place. Even with the recession, property here is still really expensive. You get a better place renting.
Still need quite a big place -- if you call this big, which kinda it is -- because of the boys. Younger one is mulling over coming here after he graduates from college next spring. Only one can live with us at a time, my husband says, like having only one in diapers.
Do I even have a choice anymore?
Can I even leave? Or is this it for awhile?

Help

I used to have help. Boy did I.
I was the queen of having help. Anyone who knows me knows that.
I had the same woman work for me for almost 20 years. Helping me. In four countries.
How lucky is that?
She helped me raise my kids, bury my parents, work as a journalist. She cleaned my houses for all that time, too, did all my husband's ironing.
God, the things she did. Not cheap, of course, how could it be? But worth it.
God, I've missed her. It was like my left arm got amputated. Even though we both needed a break after all those years together.
She stopped working for us when we sold our suburban house last summer and I left my job. She was just coming a couple hours a week at that point, ever since my boys left for college, but still, she was still around.
But then we sold our house. And I left my job.
No job, no help needed, pretty much.
Not just because of the money, although you do think about that, if you're a woman, when you're not working.
Didn't really need any help though. We had moved downtown to a small apartment in D.C. for the last six months we were in the States. Most of our stuff was in storage.
My husband was traveling a lot those last few months in Washington, covering the presidential campaign. My boys were away at college. I was alone a lot in the apartment, not working. Not much got dirty.
And she didn't want to work for me there either. Both of us had had enough, I guess, which makes me sad.
And then here, it's taken us awhile to settle in. (Are we settled in now?) And it was just the two of us. And I was in Italy a lot.
Anyway, this morning, I spent half the morning cleaning the bathrooms here. Finally found a spray that removes the hard water stains on the shower glass door. That was driving me crazy. Never had that before.
With three of us living here now, you need to clean a good 45 minutes a day, I reckon, just to keep up.
There's always something, don't we all know it -- vacuuming, washing, the kitchen, the bathrooms.
With three adults, two of them male.
Perhaps I should get a cleaning lady now. Just a couple hours a week.
Don't know who to get. Feels like a chore to find someone.
People say you need a recommendation. Got to trust the person.
And does that mean you really live somewhere, when you get a cleaning lady?
The signs I've seen around are all Eastern European ladies looking for work.
Do I need to spend the money? Or can I just do it myself?
There's a part of me that would rather do it myself.
Because I know exactly what needs doing.
Like women do.
But I also hate doing it.
Like women do.
But I like it when it's done.
Like women do.

So Many People

One of the most striking differences between living in London and living in Washington is that here, you're living next door to all of humanity -- in all its life stages. In the States, you're much more segregated, always with your tribe of the time. In most places anyway.
In our neighborhood here, in west London, there's everyone pretty much. Suburban families, with kids in strollers up through secondary school. Older people, either couples or singles, living alone. Young people just starting out on their lives sharing flats.
Not to mention from every country. Americans. French. Polish. Italian. Middle Eastern. British, even. Colin Firth even. All right here. All ages of them.
In downtown Washington, where we lived for the last six months we were in the States, we were surrounded by young people. Our neighbors were mostly young adults in their late 20s or early 30s, just starting out on their careers, sharing apartments with others like them.
Washington has become THE place for East Coast kids just out of college to start their careers, since the job situation is better there than many other cities in the U.S. The federal government and all that.
And the neighborhood we were in attracted lots of young people, more and more each year.
It was nice -- lively, noisy, especially after the suburbs. But we felt old there. Didn't really fit in.
Before, for a dozen years while we were raising our boys, we lived in the quiet suburbs of Washington, where lots of other people were doing exactly the same thing as us. Raising kids in the suburbs.
Where the public schools were good. And there was room to play. And it felt safe.
But we outgrew that. Our kids grew up anyway.
New, younger families started to move in.
I like that there's such a mix of people and ages here -- that everyone lives together in the same neighborhood.
That's what American urban planners are trying so hard to achieve these days.
I just wish I had more of a connection to them.