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As I sit in our apartment, surrounded by the storm of our stuff slowly making its way into suitcases, I am very aware that this time tomorrow we will be at the airport on our way home from Florianopolis, Brazil.  The kids and I have been in a whirlwind of goodbyes to the people we’ve come to know over the last 6 months.  It’s a very sad feeling to know you may be seeing a person for the last time.  So many people ask, “When are you coming back?”, “Will you come back to live next time?”.  I have no answer for that  – only, “I don’t know. We’d like to come back sometime.”  It seems very inadequate and yet it’s the truth.

Living a nomadic lifestyle is very exciting in many ways.  I truly feel blessed to have this opportunity and to be able to share it with our children.  Still – this is the hard side of it.  We fall in love with people, with places, with ways of life, and then it’s time to leave.

There have been so many acts of kindness, so many smiling faces and jokes.  Brazilians are a very warm and affectionate people.  We will miss them.  We will miss the amazing lunch buffets at our local kilo restaurants, the artisans at the weekend market who became our friends, the bus rides over the mountains, the strange melancholic music of the propane sellers as they drive the streets.  We will miss seeing our landlord and landlady tending to their immaculate pousada, the parrots out the window, watching the clouds come and go over the mountain.  And of course, we will miss our good friends, the Pirmez family, who invited us on this journey almost a year ago.  But most of all we will miss the “what ifs”, the untold story of what might have happened had we stayed, what relationships might have grown, what courses our lives might have taken.  We’ll never know.

Long ago our ancestors had very few choices in their lives.  Many died in the same town where they were born, doing the work their parents had done.  Now we have so many choices.  Forks in the road present themselves and every time we choose one we choose against another.  Every fork will alter our lives in some way that we’ll never realize because the alternative will never be played out.  All we have is our instinct to guide us about which turn to make and then we must look forward and trust that chose well.

And our goodbyes will be followed by hellos.  Hellos to a wonderful set of old friends and familiar places – comfort for the holidays.  On to the next chapter in our lives.  Goodbye Florianopolis!  We loved you – and yes, hopefully someday we’ll come back!