At Home

I was really beginning to appreciate my good fortune. My heart would fill suddenly with absolute joy at the situation in which I found myself. The black cloud of fear was moving away, and I started to see the beauty around me.

One morning, driving down the hill from the American School toward my house, I noticed the stunning view ahead of me: the jagged profile of the Guadarrama Mountains, already snow-capped, against the impossibly clear blue sky. It wasn’t visible from everywhere in the neighborhood—only from that steep hill where I was driving—but I drove down that hill often, and that beauty was available to me many times each week. “I can’t believe it,” I thought. “It’s like living close to the Rocky Mountains, but with Madrid twenty minutes away.” I had a cassette tape that I often played in the car, with a mix of songs I liked, and there was a Van Morrison song that became the soundtrack for that view: “When it’s not always raining, there’ll be days like this/When there’s no one complaining, there’ll be days like this/Everything falls into place like the flick of the switch/Yeah, my mama told me there’ll be days like this.”

Coming home from the gym, too, I could catch a view of the mountains. I had started driving into the city for the 2:30 aerobics class, because there was no inbound traffic at that time—if anything, people were leaving for lunch. I’d park in the garage under the gym, take my class, shower fast, and drive home around 3:45, before the traffic started back up. And as I headed northwest out of Madrid there was another stunning glimpse of those peaks. As a Midwesterner, I was floored every time I got a look, and somehow I never got jaded about it. I just continued to gape at the wonderful view. “You’d better appreciate this,” I warned myself. “This is more beauty than most people ever get to live with.”

I gained an appreciation of another phenomenon on those gym days. After class I was always in a huge rush to get out of the locker room and home before my kids got back from school, so I’d slam through a shower, throw on my clothes and run. But over time I noticed that the Spanish women around me weren’t doing that. “They’re taking a leisurely shower, toweling off without hurry, and spending a good ten or fifteen minutes rubbing lotion into every square centimeter of their skin,” I observed to myself. Once I became aware of this, I was in awe. “Tu piel está muy seca,” I’d been told one day when I went for a manicure—“Your skin is very dry.”

The women of Madrid knew they were living in a dry climate, and they absolutely made the time to moisturize their skin. I still lived a life in which getting on to the next activity was supremely important, but all around me were people who were doing what was necessary to care for themselves beautifully, not rushing at all. I had begun to notice.