Why Are We In Spain? Good Question!

A couple months ago I met up for drinks and tapas with an old friend while she and her husband were traveling in Spain with their daughter, who had just finished a semester abroad in Seville. The wine flowed as we feasted on tapas, reminiscing about suburban Catholic high school days, a memorable school trip to New York City (It was the 80’s. We were drama students. Enough Said.) and generally being astonished that after so many years our paths would cross in Granada,Spain of all places.  And there came the question: “So, what are you doing in Spain?”  A reasonable question really, one that we are asked often and equally so, one we ask ourselves.  How does an American woman and her German husband end up living with their youngest daughter in an old house on a terraced mountainside of Southern Spain – smack in the middle of one of the worst economies in the EuroCrisis? Yes. A very good question, indeed!

The short answer is not exactly short. Even sticking strictly with the facts it is a long and sordid tale. Our early experiences bring to mind the scene in The Princess Bride when Inigo Montoya offers the man in black “his word as a Spaniard” to which the reply is “No Good. I’ve known too many Spaniards.”  For all our misfortune, this once merely chuckle worthy exchange has now been elevated to inducing side splitting laughter (all the while wincing) from the raw truth in that movie moment. Certainly it is more genuinely said that our experience here is not due to  having taken the word of  too many Spaniards but  a case of having taken the word of too many of the wrong Spaniards. We took risks, we suffered some devastating failures. We’ve survived far more defeat and setback than I could have imagined.

Still this does not provide an answer for why we are in Spain. If anything it brings to the fore another question which is “Why, after such a crappy start, are you still in Spain?”  Sensible people would have packed up and bid adios to the land of sunshine and siestas after what we went through. To be fair, being broke, unemployed, savings wiped out, on the verge of being homeless in a foreign country where you know only a handful of people, most of whom are liars …  is hardly a circumstance a sensible person is likely to find themselves navigating in the first place.  It is exactly in those circumstances though that we took the biggest leap of faith of them all. At our most desperate time we were more free to embrace the simple beauty of possibility than ever before.  Unsure of how we were going to survive past the first few months rent, we declared “If we have to be broke and hungry then this is a wonderful place to be broke and hungry.”  So we trusted deeper than we ever had before. We leapt into life here on our mountain terrace, trusting the net would appear. And it did. A stunningly beautiful net!

We are now into our 2nd year here in this place of magical giving. It is exactly what we trusted it would be. It truly is a wonderful place to be if you are broke and hungry. The welcoming care of the people whom we live among here and the generosity of the land around us provides much to be grateful for. Make no mistake though.  Broke and hungry in a wonderful place is still broke and hungry which is not wonderful. It is hard and it is scary.

And it is not where this story ends. There is more story to be written here.

There is more story being written.

That is why we are in Spain.