Espinosa Footprints: Fancy Meeting You Here

Me: [My amazing student] looked really wistful yesterday. I wasn’t sure if she was sad because she was going to miss me or miss CC… she kept making this face [:: imitates amazing student’s face::]

Noemie: She’s probably going to write you into a book. That’s the face a writer makes before they immortalize you in a story.

——

While I would be flattered beyond measure by such a distinction, I can’t flatter myself so much as to believe that my amazing student would *actually* write me into a novel...but how deliciously tragic would that be?

She’s a phenomenal writer…

It has come to this.

We spent three whirlwind years in South Florida…years that included the pandemic lockdown, Dominic and Noemie getting drivers licenses and visiting colleges, Tovi learning Latin, and Gigi getting into one scrape after another. We thought that South Florida was going to be our final post. We prepared for Danny to leave his job and set our minds on the prospect that my job at our church was to last far into the misty future.

But God thought differently.

As we reached the end of our extended tour, we recognized that our family had served its purpose during this time in Florida and that it was time to start saying our goodbyes.

Goodbye to the Classical Conversations families where we have attended and served and ministered God’s grace in various forms including wisdom, hospitality, and my favorite—sentence diagramming. Goodbye to my precious class of 10th graders who every day were learning and proving themselves to be the salt of the Earth, the light of the world, children of God, who are a part of the true vine.

Goodbye to my team of dedicated teachers, counselors, and mentors, carefully chosen by the Lord to help me meet the needs of the children of our church family-- a family we have loved and served on and off for over 13 years.

Goodbye to my sweet piano students, the private school library that I curated and maintained, and the bum sailing camp in Hutchinson Island that ditched us at the last moment.

Goodbye to our marijuana chain-smoking neighbor who generously odorized our apartment throughout the day; goodbye to the racing motorcyclists whose screaming engines seized our hearts with terror as they tore down Hiatus at 2 am every morning. We wish you a better life than you seem to wish for yourself.

And now we are here, looking out over the balcony of what is to be our home for the next three years.

Helloooo Israel! Danny actually had moved 6 weeks before us so he could get the lay of the land. He learned how to find food, he bought us a car, he learned to navigate the neighborhood on foot, and he drew the housing committee’s attention to our new house’s air vents generously coated in mold. And the termites under the loose tiles. Sigh.

But yesterday was the big day for the rest of us. We flew twelve hours non-stop from Atlanta to Tel-Aviv. I watched bits and pieces of a dozen movies besides a Gilmore Girls marathon. I listened to a chapter of a tediously narrated Dorothy Sayers mystery. And still the time seemed to drag on and on. Gigi threw up, on and off, for the last hour or two of the flight and through the airport exiting process. (She can walk and puke so effortlessly, it is really a wonder.) Our hard cello case arrived crushed as if the luggage trolley itself had dropped from the sky and landed on it, but miraculously, the cello inside appeared unharmed.

Our van driver took us and our baggage train to our assigned house which had just finished being cleared from the mold remediation and repairs that had been completed while Danny was in Florida picking us up. Consequently, the house was extremely dusty (you could taste the grit in the air) and we spent an hour chasing out a cat that was waiting for us in our living room on arrival. (He continues to haunt us. The kids named him Caligula.) We chose to go to temporary apartment accommodations to sleep and regroup. There was too much cleaning to be done on the little sleep I had gotten between my manic airplane-movie watching bursts, and the cat fiasco cost us our broom. Hopefully tomorrow we will begin the work of making our house our home.