Six months.

Today is July 9 -- and six months ago exactly, we were landing in the Bucharest airport, hesitatingly gathering our mound of luggage and searching out the face of Steve Michmerhuizen, a smiling West Michigan expat who we'd never met before.  He greeted us warmly, finding us easily in the small crowd of arrivals, and ushered us to a hotel amidst the bitter cold Romanian night.  That first 24 hours in Romania remains a blur: dinner in the heart of Bucharest, a long conversation with Diana (who has since become our supervisor and friend), and a night of deep, exhausted, dreamless sleep before a long drive across the country to Lupeni.

It seems so long ago that we were dragging our tired selves up the stairs for the first time to dear little Apartment Lucy, unpacking and arranging and cleaning and hanging things on the wall.  Our three months of study in Târgu Mureş also seem like ages ago -- the first hesitant meetings with our fabulous language teachers, the long evening walks up the city's immense hills, the many hours of flashcards and vocabulary practice in miscellaneous cafes, the Sundays full of church and friends and way too many crepes.  And now we've been in Lupeni for almost three full months, and work with FNO is starting to feel familiar, and life is slowing from the frantic excitement of everything new to the calmer rhythms of life in a place that's becoming home.

Yet at the same time, it feels like not long ago at all that we were giving tear-stained hugs to my mom and sister at the Minneapolis airport; those tears still surface now and then and remind me of the heartache of leaving.  It seems not so long ago that we were building snowmen with the Bradford girls on the retaining wall that Jack helped Nate build.  It seems not long ago at all that we were eating breakfast at Brandywine, and visiting our friends in East Hills and Alger Heights, and commuting to work via bicycle from our little apartment on Calkins.  We've been gone for six months, and life looks different for us now.  We still grow herbs and tomatoes and invite people over to eat them with us.  We still go running and hiking off the beaten path as often as we can.  We still are married, and happily so.  Six months in, I am happy here.  I feel useful here.  It is beautiful here, and the people and work and natural world around us fill me with joy and purpose, and I am glad we came.  We've missed a lot in six months -- weddings of dear friends, the growing-up of our little neighbors, the transition and healing of our church community, graduations and milestones in the lives of our siblings.  But we've gained a lot, too, as all the stories on this blog and in our journals and our memories now attest to.  

So that's that, I guess.  We've lived in Romania for six months.  That's amazing.  Please keep praying.  We love you all.