girona, my love
A little less than a year from moving away from Girona, I stepped off the plane in Barcelona and was overwhelmed by the flood of emotions that overtook me. I didn’t expect to feel so nostalgic just heading to a baggage carousel. After all, isn’t all time at the airport spent wishing the process could hurry up.
En route back to California for a trip, I decided to pop in to Girona and stay with my best friend there. I knew it would be familiar and a relaxed trip as I had a list of people to see, and stores and restaurants to visit. My first night there I took a sunset walk through old town. When Neilson was traveling last year, I would head out after dinner and take this exact same walk, stopping for frozen yogurt and meandering through the cobbled streets, eventually finding myself in the gardens. As it would get later and later, I would always end at the top of the cathedral steps, the only place where the sun hadn’t yet been covered by the buildings.
Even a year later, I still reach for my camera at some of the exact same spots. The lush greenery creates charming vignettes of the areas around town that always catch my eye. I walk past the exact spot I remember bringing me to tears. Where I would sit and wonder what in the world God wanted me to accomplish in my life in this new foreign country, feeling so isolated from what I knew how to do and the people who understood me most.
Last year, these walks were my medicine. Now, walking through the city our young marriage took roots in, I realize how far I’ve come from the scared wife who moved to a country she’d never been to before, and immersed herself in a new “world” and lifestyle all based around cycling. I’m still figuring out where I fit into it all, but I’m so grateful for the people who God placed in my life exactly when I needed them. The friends I would probably never have met in any other scenario of my life, who have shepherded me through the hardships, and growing pains of our strange lifestyle.
As my friends repeated to me this week, no-one has it all figured out. And there is grace in knowing that.