stockpiling memories

There really wasn’t much of a middle, it seems to me. There was the beginning, whose end was difficult to determine since we still have so much to see and learn here, and now we’re into the beginning of the end. We have two real vacations plus a long weekend or two packed into the next couple of months in the frantic atttempt to see as much of Europe as possible before we have to leave it. We have tentative plans to see a couple of online friends here, who have been on our must-see-in Europe list all along. We’re beginning to set plans for finding apartments and moving, and to deal with the mountain (a foothill at the very least) of paperwork that has to be done by then.

Tonight I’m going out rowing in a double after work. This is far from the last time; we may even be able to get in a race or two before we leave. Still, the times I’ll take out a boat on this canal, with green, green trees leaning over me as I row under old bridges, talking to my crewmate about extra pressure on ‘bakboord’ or ‘stuurboord’, has a boundary now and that bound is gliding closer and closer. I feel I ought to be conscious of these last rows, especially since I really don’t know how much I’ll get on the water in Taiwan – I ought to save every row in a memory bank somewhere and in fact I ought to have done so all through this short year, so when all the vegetation around me is tropical (or possibly nonexistent – I haven’t seen Taipei yet!) I can remember rowing with autumn leaves drifting down onto me, beside bare branches with dogwood and forsythia visible between the dreaming trees, under the full midsummer arch of green.

(Anyway, it may be raining on us today. better to think about the views of green-through-mist than to swear at raindrops landing on my head. Especially given the last ten years in the desert and the next two in the tropics, where rowing during rain is rare because it’s so likely to be accompanied by strong winds and lightning.)

I’ll be spending the next few months thinking “the end, the end, remember this” on and off, I think. It’s probably a little early, but we have so much to fit in between now and the end of October (if that’s when we leave) and I want to be sure to enjoy and remember all the things I’ve loved here.