My Senior Year Abroad

Ancestors, visas, sex parties and home.

I’ve been trying like hell to write this dispatch, but all my brain seems to be doing these days is making low humming sounds punctuated occasionally by other noises that sound a little like durrrrr and duhhhhhh. Is it perimenopause? Lingering jet lag? Reverse culture shock? A few searching and try-hard drafts are moldering away in my Google Docs boneyard along with a YA novel about teenage pirates I started and abandoned, an essay about unwanted hair that I am on the precipice of making into something good (but feels too vulnerable to publish right now), and the many resumes and bios I’ve been cranking out the past few months.

This is another way of saying we made the long journey home, weathered jet lag and illness, and once again live in Portland, Oregon in our rambling old home with our beautiful yard, in our quiet neighborhood that occasionally gets very spicy, amongst an alarming amount of stuff. So.Much.Stuff.

Our friends made our landing sweet and tender; they filled our home with flowers and food, threw us a party, and generally just reminded us how incredibly fortunate we are to be surrounded by so many smart, kind, funny and generous people. We got to hold babies and pet dogs and share food and be known and understood.

Still, I’ve been stumbling around completely disoriented, a feeling I can only compare to the weeks after you get dumped by someone you really loved. Everything is weird and muted, and then sharp and too much. I want to be in the world and I want to hide. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here other than spend copious amounts of money on groceries (holy shit! price gouging and inflation!) water the plants in the garden, search for a job and try really hard not to think about how truly dysfunctional this place really is. And to be clear, by this place I mean America, not Portland. Portland has many problems, but really those problems stem from being a part of this big dumb country.

Is that too harsh? Maybe. But right now I stand firmly behind that statement. I mean, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do upon your return from your Senior Year Abroad? Annoy every single person you know about how much more enlightened/cultured/humane the culture you cosplayed for a year is, and make constant and infuriating statements about what we can learn from their wisdom and way of life? Well, I am not immune.

I’m here to say that there is ONE thing that could change it all, and that one thing is UNIVERSAL GODDAMN HEALTHCARE. Now I will stumble off of my soapbox and resume my navel gazing.

Gorgeous Peninsula Park (our neighborhood park) the morning after we arrived back home.

This is what I wrote about our last week in Venice:

The city is sweating.

There is a swervy and dazed quality to the way that people are moving through the streets. The scent of star jasmine and the briny undertones of the lagoon add a sensorial drama that is so specifically this place at this time of year, it makes me want to burst out crying. I am eternally sticky and red-faced, the water makes my skin itchy, my hair has never been so unruly, I’m obsessively annoyed by selfie-stick-wielding tourists and the mosquitoes are relentless, and yet, I am in love with Venice. And now it’s time to leave.

Living on a tiny island —a place where people have been fishing, making glass, praying, partying, fucking and fighting for over a thousand years— has been a master class in what it means to be from somewhere. The rituals, traditions, language, superstitions, grudges—all of it has been nurtured and perpetuated. These people belong to this place. They are of this place.

And while I am American, and will never not be an American, I do not feel this same connection to where I am from. My ancestry is one of continual displacement. An uneasy relationship with “home” is part of my DNA; it lives in my bones and my nervous system. It’s the reason that wherever I am I compulsively nest, plant gardens and seek out community. I feel compelled to anchor myself as much as possible, both honoring and attempting to quiet the ancestral whispers of warning that it could all be taken away at any moment.

When I was in middle school I became fixated on narratives of immigration and forced removal. I read book after book about the Plains Indians, as well as stories of Eastern and Southern European immigration to the United States. There was something about the trauma of dislocation, of leaving home never to return, that spoke to me in a way that I’m just now starting to unwind. Having a connection to a specific geographic place, where your culture springs directly from that relationship, and then being severed from that place, that’s HEAVY business.

My thinking —and I’m quite sure it’s wholly unoriginal— is that the sticky residue of so much of what I’ll call “loss of home,” including the forced removal of indigenous people from their ancestral lands, the kidnapping and subsequent enslavement of African Americans, and the trauma of immigration itself, is one of the *many* reasons that America is in such a dark place right now. There is so much loss and grief circulating through the bodies, memories and lineages of so many of us that the collective bereavement for what has been lost is massive.

Things I’ll miss most: the floors. Especially the mosaic floors of San Donato.

We created a sweet little life for ourselves in Venice and then we left. We traveled back through time (isn’t flying weird?) to a life that looks pretty much the same but feels very different. And while I am incredibly grateful for our community and for access to the wild and wondrous lands of the PNW, I am heartbroken.

After my last post a few well-intentioned readers reached out to ask why it is that we don’t just stay another year. The simple answer is: money. The more nuanced answer is: visas, renting out our house, and the necessity of making money.

In December 2021, when we decided in earnest to embark on this adventure, my very wise friend Cory told me that based on her experience of moving her family to Spain for a year, we should anticipate three potential issues: 1) Visas 2) Renting out our house, and 3) Only staying for one year.

It turns out that she was correct on all accounts. You know when people tell you to “trust the process” and that “things will fall into place,” well, sometimes they don’t.

I’ll start with the house. Our budget for the year was predicated on at least covering our mortgage and bills by renting our home. Much to our dismay, our plan to rent it as a “furnished flex rental” (longer than a month, less than 11 months) using a property management company never panned out. Time and time again potential renters decided it was too risky to live in the wilds of North Portland post-pandemic. Apparently the fear of car theft was so great that a lack of garage space for securely parking cars became the major sticking point for the kind of people who can afford a furnished rental.

In an act of desperation while we figured out another plan, we shifted to Airbnb which ended up being a complete nightmare. Our stint as co-hosts (still with the property management company) came to a screeching halt when a group of teenagers created a fake account, rented our house for the night, and according to the police who were summoned not once, but twice, “Threw the party of a lifetime.” They trashed our home and traumatized our neighbors and left us to deal with the wreckage and the 5-month-long battle to be compensated for damages by Airbnb.

They left bongs (yes, many bongs), barf, trash, a broken window and a monumental mess; and relieved us of the bulk of our sheets, towels and faith in the goodness of strangers in our home.

Upon our arrival home we also discovered the evidence of another renter’s party —this one of the more adult and sexually adventurous variety. Randomly placed chairs, thumbtacks in the crown molding, and a notebook outlining a cornucopia of scheduled XXX rated events, told an entirely different tale of a long weekend of debauchery in our sacred nest. Cleo, who had been incredibly reticent to have anyone random in our house because of the “weird stuff” they might do there, was in fact completely justified to feel apprehensive. If you’re reading this, Cleo, I am sorry and you were right.

Needless to say, the formerly innocuous spirit that lives in our house was pissed for the duration of our absence.

In the name of sanity and the restoration of good vibes in our beloved home and neighborhood, we found two dependable house sitters to move in. They covered utilities and a portion of the mortgage—the remainder we took as an enormous financial hit.

Cleo reclaiming her room.

And then there were the visas. The key to Italian Visas is stamps and screaming. You cannot get the stamps you need without verbally duking it out. Unfortunately I didn’t learn this valuable lesson until way too late in the process of trying to obtain our visas. We started the visa paperwork process in February of 2022, thinking that 6 months might be cutting it close, but that I’d be able to spend the summer dealing with all the bureaucratic hurdles that might eventually pop up. Each Italian consulate in the US has DIFFERENT rules and requirements for the visa, and the websites for each vary widely. The process was opaque and labyrinthine. It was our first real acculturation.

What I didn’t account for is the waiting. The waiting for the Italian lawyer in Venice to file paperwork for Andy’s work permit. The waiting for emails and phone calls to be returned by anyone at the Italian Consulate in San Francisco. The waiting for the all-powerful thwack of a stamp being applied to a pile of papers so thick and impressive that you feel as if you’ve truly accomplished something monumental in your life.

Here’s a little glimpse into one miniscule part of the process. Months into our bureaucratic journey we were told that in order for Andy to get a working Visa, we would need to prove the worthiness of his degree from Cal Poly; an official copy of his transcripts and diploma was not sufficient. We had to prove that his documents were legitimate by obtaining a notarized version of each, as well as a signature from the current Registrar of Cal Poly and an apostille stamp by the California Secretary of State. After we received that paperwork, we had to have it all officially translated into Italian and sent to the Italian Consulate in San Francisco.

I must have called and emailed the Italian Consulate in San Francisco 50 times in the process, trying in vain to get anybody to help us. The phone rang and rang. They had no receptionist, no answering machine and no useful information in English. No one answered emails. Finally I got ahold of the woman in charge —perhaps the only person working there??—who at first pretended not to be able to find the paperwork we’d submitted, and then once she conceded that she had it sitting on her desk, proceeded to tell me that we’d done it all wrong. She screamed at me that I was wasting her time and threatened to hang up on me. And that’s when I lost it. I screamed back. I cried and I yelled. I snotted. I yelled and cried some more. And lo and behold, she gave us our stamp.

I should say that all of this took the majority of the 6 months we’d set aside as well as almost $1,000. And we still hadn’t even begun the paperwork for our actual visas. By the time Andy’s work permit was approved we had three weeks before we were supposed to depart. We’d already rented an apartment, Cleo was set to begin school and Andy was slated to begin his project and we still had no visas. Not knowing how long the next part of the process might take, we decided to carry on with our original plan for departure and deal with the chaos from Venice. I packed every possible piece of paperwork I envisioned needing (including birth certificates and marriage certificates notarized and stamped with an apostille by the Oregon Secretary of State) into my carry on and hoped that things might work out.

They didn’t.

Three months later we found ourselves in the office of an Italian immigration lawyer, photocopying hundreds of pieces of paperwork in our attempt to appeal for a permesso di siorgono (permission to stay). The Italian government was so backed up that our appointment was made for August 2023, a month after our planned departure. This meant that while we wouldn’t be deported (a win), we also could not leave Italy until August unless it was on a direct flight home.

All of it was a master class in letting go of what you simply cannot control and hoping for the least amount of shrapnel possible.

Cleo being interviewed for a South Korean tv show at her favorite pasta place in Padova. She loves their pasta Genovese (pesto) so much that we made one final trip before our departure so she could have it. The topper was getting to hype it for an audience!

When we began dreaming this year into reality we were still in the middle of the pandemic and our marriage was in a not-so-great place. We knew that continuing as we had been—dragging ourselves through the same routines, fighting the same fights and slogging our way through a shadow of the life we’d hoped to be living—was grinding both of us down into people we no longer recognized.

Leaving was scary and financially reckless, and it was also the greatest decision we’ve ever made as a family. (Well, that and the Soda Stream sparkle water maker). All of the best things I’ve done in this life have their origins in the kind of risk taking that makes me feel like I might poop my pants. I constantly have to convince myself to turn into my fear, to run directly towards everything that scares me the most. If I didn’t sometimes listen to the quiet voice in my head that reminds me of the big risk to big rewards ratio, I’d have allowed the noisy part of me that likes things safe and predictable to have kept me in my comfy bed watching too much tv ad infinitum.

The night before we left for Italy I said a tearful goodbye to my beloved “Pilly.” I don’t have a picture of our reunion, but I can tell you it was EMOTIONAL. Also, now that most of our bedding is m.i.a. and I have sworn off the color grey, I’m pumped to get some new colorful/patterned sheets. Any recommendations for super soft and not one million dollars?

A brief note about the future of this newsletter:

This newsletter, which I started writing as a vehicle for documenting and sharing my thoughts about our year in Venice, is now going to morph into something else. I am going to allow for it to organically take shape, with the hope that you will come along with me for the ride. So far it has been an incredibly fulfilling project. I’ve loved the dialogues that have sprouted from it, and I feel humbled by and grateful for your thoughtful and engaged readership.

I am still resistant to the idea of monetizing it, because like all my creative projects, it just feels better when it isn’t attached to capitalism. What you can do to support me and my work is to share it with friends, and drop me a line if you know of anyone great doing something really interesting who might be looking for someone like me to hire.

Sending love,

xo, Belle

Hot Links!

My friend and colleague Sarah Moon and I are doing a thing! It’s a workshop called Perihelion, and it’s all about reconnecting with your innate creativity, quieting your inner critic and establishing sustainable creative practices. It’s coming up in Portland on the 30th of July. Here’s the flyer and info. There are still 2 or 3 spots left. Email me if you want in. If it goes well, and hopefully it will, there will be more events in the future.

Did you watch Jury Duty? If not, you should. Not only because it is silly and hilarious, but because it will actually restore your faith in humanity. This is not hyperbole.

This essay in which philosopher Agnes Callard makes a case for NOT traveling is a fascinating read.

Sometimes I think that aside from being reincarnated as a cat, I would most like to be reincarnated as a successful author who also owns a small bookstore. Louise Erdrich, one of my favorite authors and small bookstore owner, obliquely wrote about this reality in her novel The Sentence. It’s a quiet and moving book about the power of reading and books, ghosts, ancestors, the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the stories we carry with us and Indigenous communities in the Twin Cities.

We horror-watched the documentary Shiny Happy People about the Duggar family and the Christian Nationalist cult they proselytize for, The Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP). The documentary is really well made and provides compelling context for what’s going on politically in America right now (and especially with regard to recent Supreme Court decisions).

Catherine Newman’s novel We All Want Impossible Things made me laugh and cry and cry. This book is a beautiful elegy to the power of enduring friendship and community in the face of illness and grief. In the epilogue she credits Miriam Toews (also one of my most favorite writers) with writing the best funny/sad book ever (All My Puny Sorrows). And while I agree, I think that We All Want Impossible Things may also be a contender. *Sidenote: two of the characters in the book are named Bell and Violet! What are the chances? Bonus: the way she writes about parenting is so reassuring and relatable. Another bonus: This tour of her house.

For the 7 days that I was tortured by nighttime wakefulness as a result of the worst jet lag I’ve ever experienced, I indulged in re-watching all the best episodes of High Maintenance. And guess what? They are still SO good. The original web shorts are the best, but the catalogue runs deep. Enjoy!