Wow, where to start? This time last year we were in Wales spending Christmas with family, Sharon and I were up at her sister’s house whilst the boys played with cousins. I wrote a job application for a post that, to be honest, I didn’t know much about, just that it sounds interesting. Why not? might at least get a trip to Pittsburgh out of it.
Soon after heading to sunny Austin, just about escaping freak February snow to catch my flight in London, I’m in Pittsburgh for an afternoon and a day. I’m meeting staff, and students, presenting and interviewing before spinning out of the door into a waiting car to take me back to the UK. I spend longer at Washington Dulles Airport on the tarmac as the plane fixes electrical problems. Solution – turn it all off and on again.
A week goes by and I start to think it might not happen, the next morning the email comes through with the offer. After a torrid week thinking about everything, we are talked out – you can’t fathom the “what if’s” and “how’s and why’s” we churn through. We talk to friends, family, and neighbors. We are drained and exhausted, we say yes.
The rest of the summer was a blur of trips to the tip, the end of work, emotions flying, ups and downs, eager anticipation, anxiety, and excitement. We paint the house and lay new carpets, we do the jobs we’d needed to do years ago and watch as a big van takes our remaining possessions away. We camp out in an empty house with no curtains, finishing the last few jobs, ready for tenants.
I flew by way of Amsterdam and Keflavik to arrive the first week in August and stayed in carefully tidied houses, meeting friendly outgoing people, enjoying bright sunshine, walked tired and slightly dazed by the past few months. Jet-lag keeps you in a sort of dream state so that don’t know what’s going on, and I felt unsettled, detached, self-diagnosed culture shock. Everything is different, in this place. That and walking up hills or down steep roads.
I went about my jobs preparing for the family to arrive, the process of getting an address to get a phone, getting a bank account, getting a card, to transfer money. I spent a few weeks at work in a glimmering new building, just as the final wiring was taking place. I was eager to be reunited with my family.
The first night I picked them up from the airport and took them to a flat I’d found near the school and not far from the house that we were looking forward to moving into, a disaster, unclean and un-cared for – a terrible place that had looked ok in the photos but turned out to be lousy, everyone cried to sleep that night and we abandoned in the morning, eventually getting our money back and moved into a hotel, with an outdoor pool and cable tv.
Bit by bit we’ve pieced things together, moving into our lovely house on Serpentine Drive, with its creaky wooden floors and open spaces, the deer that come and visit next door and neighbours that bring cookies and welcome chats. The boys are at school and already the seasons have changed from the sweltering summer, when our AC conked out and we poured with sweat in our beds, to the vast fall of autumn leaves, sweeping and blowing great piles onto the roadside to be collected.
We’ve got our winter clothes on now, enjoying the snow when it comes and adapting to each day, slowly collecting friends and fun places to visit, the children’s museum and science center. We’ve tasted tacos and rolled up ice cream, to better soothe the many injections and inoculations. We’ve been to dinner parties and beer tastings, in the summer we dived in the cool waves of Lake Erie, a lake-sea without salt.
Our Mount Lebanon is the same as any family here, we bump into school friends in the library, the boys play soccer in the local rec and travel teams, and we look out for changes in the weather and play table football in the basement. We wake up alone and miss our friends and family back home but speak on phones and iPads, catching up on news.
We go to work, and school and do our jobs, we relax, piece together jigsaws, paint, draw, sew and make things. It cost a great deal to come here, so we’re saving our pennies and trying to spend wisely. We love it, our adventure, especially heading out and exploring, to see the rapids and rivers of Ohiopyle or into the city through the neighbourhoods. We cross the Hot Metal Bridge and drive through Squirrel Hill to the farmers’ market in Lawrenceville, we eat soul food on East Carson Street, visit friends in Upper St.Clair.
We love visitors, so please come and share this adventure with us. There are two spare sofa beds, both comfortable and easy to assemble when you’re tired from all the doing. Every morning travelling on the bus or driving through the Liberty tunnel the city reveal blows you away, as you barrel across one of the many bridges, the downtown skyline ahead of me, the skyscrapers and stadiums of the city.
