Posted by Loulou on Jun 24, 2013 | 1 comment

Mama and papa’s friends sometimes come through our little village, not often, but when they do, I wonder what they see?  Their doctor in Los Angeles was here not long ago, and mama says that he and his wife really saw our little village and really got what it is that makes mama and papa love this place and this life so much (of course, I help in that respect—I’M here,  after all).

Mama says expats look like a strange breed to others. I’m an excat, haha, in a way, because I don’t know where I came from originally and I only know that now I think of myself as a French kitty and might just as easily have been myowing in Spanish or Catalan or Italian.  But  when mama and papa packed up and left their other life, it was hard to explain to their friends that they might not be coming back and that they would be speaking other languages and confronting other problems that were not like those in their previous life and that they wanted it that way because it was exciting and a little scary at the same time and that makes for  pretty nice adventures. I’ve had to live off the fat of the land (not for long, mind you, thanks to mama and papa, but still…)

Mama says that actually, everything was both more complicated at first and then more simplified, really, as it was for me when I found them.

And when friends come for a short stay, it is like watching an object falling by a window, or like the merle I see swooping down and passing through the garden for a moment and then it’s gone—visits are like that. They start, they happen, and then they’re over and everyone is back to his or her original life and sometimes your are not really sure that what you hoped they would experience really, so to speak, “took”.

But mama says that when you leave, actually leave a country and a life and family and really good friends, you have to be ready to go through a time of, let’s just call it unrest. You are different and you are apart and you have started out on a new and unknown journey on which you cannot bring with you exactly what you had before and which requires new thinking, new solutions. But as on any trip, mama says, you like to think you might pack more efficiently this time…

It was like that for me out in the wild before I found mama and papa, except I didn’t choose my fate out there.

Someone else did.

The shits.

But lucky for me—now we can face our new life together, mama, papa and I, and when friends come to visit, all of us try to show them just what it was that drew us all here in the first place, and that includes me. (I don’t set out dishes of anchovies for them the way mama did for me, but you get the picture).

Do they see what is magical about this place or wonder why mama and papa left at all, do they wonder why mama and papa changed to such a simple, different life compared to the other one?  I see that some visitors just really want to be sure that they will be going home again, after the ordeal and stress of travel and the myriad changes required to cope with it. Maybe they just like to visit this life, not really live it.

But mama and papa won’t be doing that because they’ve told me that they take their different homes with them when they travel, and mine, even if they might land up back in one of the countries they chose to live in in the first place!  Mama says that even coming back to a home anywhere from somewhere else feels like new territory.