When Cão Means Dog

Charting our next life chapter in Portugal, with passionfruit as our guide.

When you are drinking rosé sangria with passionfruit with your sweetheart on a beach at sunset, it’s easy to believe anything is possible. Especially when you’ve spent the last six months in cancer treatment.

But now, the toughest stuff is behind you. Your hair is styled in a pixie cut that you try to convince yourself makes you look French, even though your partner lovingly jokes that when you slick it back to calm the spiky bits, you look like Grandpa Munster.

No matter. That dream you had to move to Portugal, before breast cancer upended your plans, is back on the table.

J. and I came to Portugal in search of a house. Spoiler alert: We learned a lot about ourselves and our partnership in the process.

Long-term accommodations are one of the key requirements for the visa and eventual residency permit we are pursuing. Even though we’ll be tethered to Seattle for a while, we needed to sort out housing now.

The last time we bought a house was 28 years ago.

During the unpleasant winter and spring months of chemo and radiation, I entertained myself by ogling real estate sites and staying in touch with our Portuguese real estate agent, who would frequently send me uplifting messages via What’s App.

I can’t stress enough how important it was for me to have this dream on the horizon while I was enduring hardcore treatment. My oncology care team knew it too and Portugal often came up during our check-ins. I knew they were rooting for me.

How surreal to be in treatment one day, and enjoying clams on the beach the next day.

And the day after that, we were off, with a tight schedule of properties to view.

I loved the hunt, though it revealed an obsessive component of my character that I didn’t necessarily care to acknowledge. Like the way I get when I’m berry picking, I found myself unable to stop scanning the offerings, hoping for a perfect specimen.

Many Portuguese homes are “indoor-outdoor,” with lovely entertaining spaces and swimming pools, outdoor ovens, and sometimes even full outdoor kitchen/dining areas. But home-staging is not a thing in the Portuguese real estate market and many of the properties we viewed were decidedly lived in.

Sometimes the owners were present when we visited. One, a woman with grown children and grandchildren, who no longer had the energy to keep up her five bedroom house, swimming pool, and large vegetable garden; another, a newly divorced man, whose home still bore the remnants of family games and hiding places. Like us, they were preparing for their next chapters.

There’s a lot to love about the area of the Silver Coast where we have decided to settle, but what is making it feel like our next home is the community we are building. Even though we had been gone for a year, we were welcomed back with open arms and hearts.

The Portuguese word for passionfruit is maracujá and it is emblematic of the gentle, easygoing lifestyle we are attracted to. Take a walk along the spectacular coastline and then cool down with maracujá gelato. What’s not to like?

Maracujá sangria in Nazaré

By the end of the first week, we had found two properties we were interested in buying — one a mashup of a traditional Portuguese home and a Pacific Northwest cabin that felt familiar and cozy, and the other a modern dwelling with a spectacular view that would represent a very different style of living than what we are used to, a prospect that both excited and frightened us.

“I realized when I came to Portugal that, just because I’ve always done things a certain way, it doesn’t mean I have to continue to do them that way,” my wise friend D counseled.

My dream is to move to Portugal. J’s dream is to have a home with a view. This next chapter belongs to both of us and so, we need to be dream weavers.

Hold hands with your life partner and take a big-ass leap of faith.

Nazaré sunset

Then, watch the chemo brain fog evaporate, as you drill into the details of home inspections (also not a thing in Portugal) and mortgages and what you will do with all of your stuff, all while trying to learn Portuguese. (Not only does cāo mean dog, but copo means glass).

My mind was sharpening and I loved it. I felt like myself again.

What Goes Around Comes Around

In a previous life, I conducted visa interviews at US embassies and consulates, demanding documents from people who hoped to travel or emigrate to the US. If I didn’t like what I was presented, I could refuse the person or send them back for something else. A different consular officer could see the case completely differently and make a different decision. So I know how subjective these situations can be.

J.’s stomach was unsettled after we made our house decision, but I reassured him and then downed razor clams and rosé with wild abandon after a lovely day at the beach.

The next day, while J. was temporarily unavailable, our lawyer reached out with some information that cast a shadow of doubt on one aspect of our emigration process. Portugal is notorious for its challenging bureaucracy and we were learning that it’s not just potential delays, but also inconsistency that we would have to contend with.

Part of dream-weaving is making sure the threads are secure. I had two hours to absorb the information and reach the conclusion that now was not the time to purchase a house. By the time I spoke to J., I was resigned that renting was the way to go, which, to be fair, was his initial preference.

I spent that night on the bathroom floor, barfing like a frat boy. Was it the razor clams or the unraveling of my dream?

The Portuguese elixir of life

You know those trust exercises, where you fall into another person’s arms?

We did that for each other on this trip. First me, encouraging J. when he had home buyer’s remorse. Then him, pulling out his phone and tracking down potential home rentals, when I feared my our dream was about to die.

So it is poetic justice or whatever you want to call it, that after looking at a few unsuitable properties, we saw a house that would have been perfectly fine, except no view, the one thing that will make J. happy. I was feeling desperate and exasperated. And then we went to the next place.

Here’s the view from our rental home, which sits on a lovely organic farm:

So house, check. But we’re just getting started on this roller coaster ride and it’s bringing up all kinds of feelings, some not so pleasant. I am aware of the irony of walking around the serene grounds of the Buddha Eden Garden of Peace, thoroughly agitated, until we had a chance to talk things over.

Needless to say, our next chapter will challenge us.

I would have related more to a ranting Buddha

But the benefit of mid-and-later-life, whether you are partnered or not, is that you’ve learned that life is not about happy endings, it’s about weathering storms. And appreciating passionfruit and sunsets whenever they come your way.

The Best Thing I Consumed in the Past Three Weeks

You guessed it. Passionfruit sangria. I’m gifting you this recipe, which I haven’t yet tried. If you make it, let me know what you think.