Summering
sea, spritzes, sunsets, and tabula rasas
Our Lisbon Uber driver turns me on to Salvador Sobral, Portugal’s 2017 Eurovision Song Contest winner. He croons languorously as we navigate our rental car along the roads of the Rota do Vinho Oeste, headed to the place where I want to find answers and my husband J just hopes to find wind.
This return trip to Portugal was my idea, following a glorious vacation tooling all around this beautiful country in the spring of 2022. Seduced by the idea of what a friend who lives here calls “a kinder, gentler life,” the ease of obtaining a residency permit, and the giddy posts of people who have done just that in various Portugal expat Facebook groups, I wanted to come back for a month and see what it would be like to live here. I had a remote global job, J was able to arrange remote work, our kids agreed to pet sit, and bonus for J, a longtime windsurfer who recently began learning how to wing foil, it’s windy at the Obidos lagoon.
Then my job unexpectedly ended and I was thrown into an existential crisis. Looking for work when you are a woman over 60 will do that to you. It’s like shouting into a void.
My retired friends say the best part of their downshifted lives is the tabula rasa – you wake up each morning and ask yourself how you would like to spend the day.
This is not a natural state of being for me. In the three months of my unexpected freedom (if you can call it that), I’ve preferred the days when I stay busy – hunting for jobs, filling out unemployment claim forms, baking. Sure, I’ve taken my share of contemplative walks and runs, listened to lots of podcasts (I love Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Wiser than Me, and Talk Easy with the charming and insightful-beyond-his years Sam Fragoso), played lots of pickleball (more on succumbing to that stereotype in a future post); and each month took advantage of our city’s First Thursday, when the museums are free. Still, the days when I’ve been alone and unscheduled have felt long and lonely.
Typical Virgo, I imagine my oldest daughter, an Aquarius, nodding knowingly.
I tell my friends that this dormancy feels like an important learning period: how to retire in the most elemental sense of the word; how to be the parent of adults (a friend has taught me the important phrase she learned from her 30-something son - “not my hula hoop”); how to artfully fill my tabula rasa. Figuring out what’s important to me in the final stages of midlife and beyond. But I’m a Virgo and I want to get on with it. Cross this learning off my to-do list.
At some point in this process, I become aware of the book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May and the library book conveniently becomes available to download on my Kindle the day before we leave for Portugal. Katherine May is an insightful, beautiful writer, who evocatively describes the natural world. Her call to action is to recognize the recurring seasons of our lives. In her definition, wintering, which happens to all of us, time and time again, is “a fallow period in life when you are cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds.” And this:
“Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
Yes, yes, that’s it! I feel like I have been given the guidebook that will provide answers, even though I’m not a fan of the cold.
Our first night here, wrecked from 15 hours of travel and no sleep, I turned to my favorite insomniac activity – the treasure hunt of the Kindle daily deals, where I find Spritz: Italy’s Most Iconic Aperitivo Cocktail, with Recipes. I spend that first fitful night reading about the history of spritzes, including a take-down of late 20th Century diet culture when women would drink white wine spritzers to “treat themselves” yet stay slim (Guilty. I regularly enjoyed them with air-popped popcorn). The book proffers the ideal spritz proportions, modern takes on the spritz, aperitivo snack recipes and more. I’m sure the two women who wrote this book are making a killing on it, as are the writers of the other Spritz Lifestyle book that popped up as Amazon suggestions for me.
I am a regular spritz drinker at home and am proud to have popularized the Aperol Spritz at our local Elks club, so I get it. My first insight of this trip is to decide that when I get home I should invest in a proper set of spritz stemware.
The next day, I am reading Wintering with a balmy breeze wafting through our Air BnB windows, while sipping a spritzy white Lambrusco with lime and watching the Atlantic Ocean waves crash onto the sunny beach, thinking about my next seaside meal. With all due respect to Katherine May and the insights she gains from plunging into and then retreating from the bracing cold, this is my hygge.
One of my favorite things about Oldster, the terrific Substack brainchild of Sari Botton, is her interviews with various people of various ages describing the wisdom they’ve gained.
When I read Sari’s interview with poet Maggie Smith, (whose You Could Make This Place Beautiful is one of the most insightful and beautiful books I’ve recently read), I was struck by a particular turn of phrase Maggie Smith used to describe one way she has mellowed with age (read the whole thing for context): that’s not nothing.
Having lived a few chapters, I should know by now that figuring out these life transitions takes time. Insights and answers come when they come and though there may not be any big revelations or aha moments, still that’s not nothing. I vow to be kinder to myself and let the getting of wisdom do its thing on its own schedule. Not so easy for this Virgo gal, but I’m working on it.
