These Secret Days

On place writing + a quote from Hemingway

9 AM Central European Time is 1 or 2 or 3 AM in the states—I can do the math quickly these days—which means my friends at home are sleeping. This is the part of every day I now think of as my “secret day,” ever since I lamented to another expat friend that I was finding it hard to keep up with work and friendship across time zones.

“But it’s sort of wonderful having a secret day,” she responded, and now I can never unhear it. 

So it’s just a normal Wednesday, but I am tucked away on a path beneath leafy trees, following a gurgling stream, with the birds cooing like they have nowhere else to be. The German air is crisp and a little sunshine seeps through the spring clouds, but not too much—there is rarely too much sunshine here because clouds are ubiquitous—and in some way, even the clouds feel like they are contributing to the secret-ness of my morning.

Even though I know my friends in the states are asleep—or, maybe because I know they are, and I can share without anyone listening right away—I leave a Voxer message for some writer friends. As my feet crunch the gravel beneath me, I confess to them a writing dilemma I’ve been facing: I want to work on some pieces I’ve been writing about home—inspired by Kansas—but Kansas feels too far away. On the other hand, I want to write about Europe—about all the things I’m seeing and experiencing—but Europe feels too close. I’m like an overstimulated newborn, with new things all around me and no good way to make sense of them. I want to be focused in my writing, I tell them, but instead, I feel like all I can do is hold my arms out wide like a parachute, open my Google Docs every day like a canvas, and hope something will fall in. 

After leaving the message, I carry on with the tasks of my day: getting my first haircut here, doing a little work over my open laptop, picking up the kids from school. But during the late afternoon, a message arrives from one of the other writers. She reminds me of something Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, a memoir about his expat years in Paris. 

“Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough. But that was how it worked out eventually. Anyway we would go if my wife wanted to, and I finished the oysters and the wine and paid my score in the café and made it the shortest way back up the Montagne Ste. Geneviève through the rain, that was now only local weather and not something that changed your life, to the flat at the top of the hill.”¹

Count on my writing friends—and the literary greats—to provide words for my dilemma. Although the situation presents differently for Hemingway, he names a tension of place writing and certainly of expat living: to understand a place, then to write about it honestly, you must somehow hold that place both up close and far away.

I suppose that’s the crux of my current challenge—the reason I’m struggling to write about either place. Time must unfold. I must keep learning. Somehow, just hearing Hemingway say “it worked out eventually” settles me down a bit.

But the second part of the quote—“that was now only local weather and not something that changed your life”— continues to needle me, naming something I have sensed over the past few months but haven’t yet had words to describe. 

I remember how this morning at the salon, I sat in a chair facing the window as the stylist trimmed my hair, and I watched people walk by outside with bags slung over their shoulders, making their way to work or brunch or to catch the bus. I chatted with my new stylist about the weather here, the weather where I’m from, the ways the weather affects our hair and our moods. I sipped on cappuccinos and sparkling waters which kept being offered to me (I can definitely get used to this part of European culture)—and I thought, “I can’t believe I’m here,” at the exact time I also thought, “but this is just where I live now, and soon I have to pick up the kids from school.” 

It’s strange, living in a place I only ever imagined visiting. I find myself trying to absorb the newness of my surroundings at the very same time I am trying to normalize them—learning where to park, how much to tip the stylist, how to drive my daily routes, what kind of detergent to buy.

The German weather is still unfamiliar, but it is the current local weather—and the weather in Kansas is no longer local but somehow always will be, and all I can do with these paradoxes is to keep walking them out, taking them in, tucking myself away until I understand more of the secret of these days, and all they have to say.

1. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. Scribner, 1964.