Life together.

Currently, Jack and I live in apartment 15, bloc 3, of Stradă Sârguințeii in Târgu Mureș, Romania.  Every day we climb up five flights of stairs after class and then stand, panting, to unlock the heavy wooden door to our home.  The building is quite nice, especially compared to our building in Lupeni, though it looks like a towering concrete monolith just like the rest of Romania's blocs -- just this one is mercifully free of decay.  We live with an older woman named Otilia and a dental student named Georgiana, who also rents a room.  As we've mentioned before, Otilia is a lovely lady, a recent widow who has taken in boarders so she doesn't have to live alone.  We like her a lot, and are enjoying the give-and-take of teaching each other our respective languages, the laughter and confusion of complete misunderstanding, the sharing of meals and stories, and the gradual learning of life together.

But oh, life together... what a feat that is.

Personally, I am enough of an extrovert that most of the time I enjoy living with a host grandma, trying to talk with her, listening to her go off on tangents in Romanian for thirty minutes over dinner.  We're learning more and more every day, and it's fun to realize that we're having real conversations now, about real things!  We talk about cars and driving (she has an old white Dacia, but only her husband knew how to drive it), about communism and gardening (under the regime food production was stifled by the state, so even gardening could be seen as an underground activity), about death and marriage and her grief for her husband (he passed away just last June), and about the bizarre things we do to American food (last night I made cookie dough brownies, if that helps explain).

Otilia is a lovely, intelligent, lively woman, and living with her brings us joy.  But I also am recognizing in myself the desire to "nest" -- a longing to make our home cozy and ours, to hang things on the walls, to play some Bruce Cockburn and The Duhks and dance around without feeling like an imposition.  Otilia has been a wonderful host and seems to enjoy putting up with our American, 22-year-old, newlywed antics.  She lets us invite people over, and helps prepare food for them (ah, the ever-hospitable Romanian hostess).  She makes soup and buys bread and cooks potatoes from her garden and offers food to us many times a day, always checking to make sure we've eaten.  It is good to live here.  But how to make home?

I guess this is what it feels like to combine intercultural communication and adaptation with newlyweds learning to live in someone else's home for three months.  It's not a common thing for American couples to live with other people, and after seven months of having our own apartment, I'm realizing that this is a big adjustment.  I like it here, a lot.  I really do.  I don't think I'd be learning nearly as much Romanian if we lived alone, and in fact, I think Jack and I would be a bit bored and lonely.  But right now, as I sit on the Tweety Bird duvet cover in our bedroom, looking at the white-lace-and-orange-linen curtains that shield the balcony, lamenting the pile of books and flashcards and waterbottles and electronics that clutter the small table in our bedroom, I feel some nesting, cozying, mama-bird instinct kicking in, wanting to make this place look and feel more like home... to me.

So perhaps I will allow myself to accept that God created us to long for and appreciate beauty, and I'll go for a long walk in the woods.  And then maybe I will go buy a basket to organize the clutter and a candle or two to make the space cozy, and turn off the lights so as not to see the robin's-egg-blue paint on the walls.  I will appreciate the things that are beautiful already -- the gorgeous stained wood of the wardrobe, the lovely woven rug, the plants growing on the balcony -- and remind myself that preferences are not all that important, after all.  I will appreciate the gifts of hospitality and generosity and food, and let Otilia know that I appreciate them.  And as we live here together, Jack and I, we will make it home --  because home is a place of love and safety and hospitality... and some beauty and coziness, if you can muster it.  So we make home by living here, by loving here, by belonging here.

Tweety Bird duvet cover and all.