“Have you talked to your mother lately?” I asked Michael this morning. “I called her yesterday.” “And did you talk to her?” “No, she wasn’t home.” “Did you leave a message?” “Oh my God!” Michael said. “Someone please help me.” “If you’d just give me a detailed answer the first time, I wouldn’t have to…
Author: renaissancerebecca
Living with Michael: Part 1
Michael usually wakes up an hour or two before me. He slips out of bed, tiptoes out the door and slowly pulls it closed behind him. I rarely hear him leave. When I wake up, I text him. Seconds later he bursts through the bedroom door and jumps back into bed, smothering my neck with kisses. Yes. Really. Every…
An EU Passport? Yes, please. (Becoming Italian: Part 1)
When my boyfriend Michael first proposed we go live in Europe for a while, he wanted to go for a year. “But there’s one thing stopping us from doing that,” he said. “What’s that?” I asked. “You like your family too much to be away from them for that long.” I looked at him incredulously. While this…
A Surprise. “For Us.”
Michael stretched a measuring tape from one corner of the television to the other, then extended it a little further. “See, hon? This is what a fifty inch would look like.” “Mm-hmm,” I said without looking up from my crossword puzzle. “And this is how big a fifty-five inch would be.” Now I had to look up,…
Entertaining Meg
“So what are you going to do with your sister when she comes to visit?” Michael asked me many weeks before she was due to arrive. “Not sure,” I said. “Well, you might want to start thinking about it. You don’t want her here with nothing to do.” “What are you talking about? It’s Asheville. There’s…
What the Psychic Said
“The first thing I’m going to talk about is your birth chart,” the woman said to me. We weren’t in the same room, nor even the same state. It was November, 2014, and my friend Lois had gifted me with an astrology reading–my first ever. The astrologer, Sue Lovett, lives in Ohio, so she recorded her reading and…
Resolution 2016: Walk the Camino de Santiago
Nope–I’m not walking it in 2016. But I wrote an article for BustedHalo.com for those who want to:) — I first heard about the Camino de Santiago in 1999. A walk across the Spanish countryside, on a pilgrimage trail carved by millions of footsteps over the last thousand years intrigued me, but it wasn’t the…
Best Moments of 2015
I did this last year, and had such a good time doing it, I thought I’d do it again. So voila: the best moment of 2015 (in no particular order). With apologies for everything I forgot. It was an eventful year! The moment I booked my flight to Nicaragua. (That was a Monday. I left three…
In Case of Fire . . .
I have committed to living one year in a home I have not yet stepped foot in. I have seen it only in pictures and videos, narrated by the man who found the space: my boyfriend Michael. There may be some women’s lib people out there who are a bit stunned or put off by this….
Lightening the Load
On my first Camino three years ago, my friend Rick and I would see people with small daypacks. These were the people who hired a service to bring their packs to their destination instead of carrying them themselves. “This walk would be a piece of cake if I wasn’t carrying a pack!” Rick would say. “Yeah, I…
RenaissanceRebecca 