This is my final week on sabbatical. Over these past months, I’ve gotten a taste of what it’s like to be in complete control of my time, and wow, it was glorious.
Before sabbatical, I wondered if I’d feel unmoored without work. I wondered if I’d feel like I lost my identity. I wondered if I’d not know what to do with myself. I worried I might try to do too much, and it’d rush by too fast as a result, and I’d go back to work feeling like I still needed a break. I worried I might do too little, and I’d become sloth and useless. I worried I’d feel like I needed to be productive with the time off because I felt guilty for having it.
What happened was that I learned to enjoy life, with gratitude instead of guilt. I learned to allow myself more time to do things that add richness to my life: I lengthened my pool time so I wasn’t rushing through my swim workouts, I watched wildlife in our garden for long stretches instead of quick glances, I spent a week with friends in Utah instead of squeezing a visit in on a weekend (or not visiting at all), I stayed in France after my husband and son went home. At home, I visited every coffee shop in town and sipped from stoneware instead of paper cups. I walked to shops instead of driving to them. I napped.
I learned to pay attention to my motivation for doing a thing — am I doing it because I want to do it, or because I feel like I should do it? I did the things I truly wanted to do, and eliminated the things I didn’t. I cooked only when I felt inspired and wanted to cook. I gravitated to swimming and walking, not to bicycling, and that is okay.
I’m in my 50s, and therefore in the second half of life. Retirement is likely on the horizon in the next dozen years. Sabbatical was a test run for what life feels like without work to occupy every day: will I feel empty? Will I be bored? Restless? Or will retirement be wonderful?
It will be wonderful. I can’t wait.
In this final week off, I’m going to soak up this time as much as I can. I’m going to read on the couch during the day and not feel bad about it. I’m going to nap if I feel sleepy. I’m going to hang out in coffee shops and watch the world go by. If I feel moved to, I might think about what I can take with me from my sabbatical life into my working life. It would be a shame to wait for sabbaticals and retirement to live and enjoy. I’ve got my health and energy now, I don’t want to squander it.
Bunnies snack on the leaves of my rudbeckia out front, but not enough to do any damage. The plants are still full, and the bright yellow flowers still bloom.
Out back is a different story. Out back, the five rudbeckia I planted at the beginning of my sabbatical are mowed to the ground; a few gnawed stems and a couple strips of leaf remain. There are no yellow flowers with black centers in sight.
When my friend Jessica visited last week, we spent a lot of time together watching the happenings in the back garden. In the mornings we’d see four deer — a doe, two speckled fawns, and a young buck with fuzzy antlers. The doe grazed at the platform feeder filled with seed for the birds, and the young buck looked right into my eyes as he bit a broad leaf off a hosta. He looked right into my eyes as he chewed it, then bit another leaf off.
When we ate inside, my friend and sat on the same side of the table so we could face the glass door and look out. We watched the cardinals and finches at the feeder. We laughed when the squirrel took his turn, and we’d get up to open the door to scare him off, and he’d leap to the nearby tree branch with all four legs spread like he was doing a belly flop, desperate to catch the leafy branch rather than fall to the far away ground.
When we were outside on the deck, we sat at the tall table so we could look out over the railing. We watched chipmunks dash, and hummingbirds drink. We watched bees bumble and bunnies nibble.
One day, we looked out and saw the tops of the echinacea swaying and shaking at the back of the patch. The plants are filled in with leaves now, so the creature rummaging around in there had good cover. We couldn’t see it to identify it. We had no idea what this animal could be — bunnies and chipmunks don’t create such a ruckus. I thought the only things eating my garden were the deer and the rabbits. This obviously wasn’t a deer, and if it was a rabbit, it was a mighty big one. We watched as the swaying moved towards the edge of the patch. I saw a patch of brown bristly fur on a substantial body. “Is it a raccoon?!” Then, a round brown groundhog emerged, pawing the echinacea stems to the ground, stripping leaves off, eating as it went.
“Eeeeeee! It’s so cute!!! Look how fat!”
We watched the groundhog decimate my echinacea plants, then squealed as it waddled off — faster than you’d expect! — fat rolling, its blubbery body low to the ground as it ran up the hill.
The garden has grown quite a bit since I finished mulching at the beginning of my sabbatical. Now the animals are mowing it back down. I’m not sure what all will survive them grazing at the buffet I’ve created, but I am certainly entertained by the tableau.
AprilJunePoor hostas. Three down, one to go.Gus the groundhog was here.Bees don’t do much damage.The back yard buffetThere’s still plenty of echinacea left.Nothing seems to be eating the daisies.
I wrote every day during my recent travel to Europe. My goal was 1000 words a day, but I typically wrote 1500 to 2000. As soon as I began my journey home, on the train from Lille to Brussels, I went back to the beginning of my trip journal and started typing up what I’d written. I used my bookmarks on Google maps to find addresses of restaurants we ate at, or my photos to remind myself of places I didn’t write about, and I listed out what we did each day in the digital copy of my journals*. And then I shaped the entries into blog posts with photographs from each day’s adventures.
I am so happy I wrote every day, and that I went back and typed up what I wrote. This is the first time I’ve done that. Between typing my hand-written entries and then blogging about our days, I got to live the vacation of my dreams three times. It was fresher during the beginning, on the travel home and on the first few days back in Blacksburg. The trip felt very close, like I could touch it again, and see the soft golden light, and hear the street sounds, and taste the crêpes, and feel how the art moved me. Now that two weeks have passed, it is fading. By the time I started typing my final journal entries a few days ago, I was already coming across things I’d forgotten about.
During these past two weeks, I’ve barely cracked my regular journal or written anything new; going through my travel journals and photographs and trying to make sense of them in blog posts has consumed most of my time since I’ve been back. Now, the photos are edited, the drawings are drawn; my journal entries are typed up true to their original stream of consciousness form, then blogged slightly more coherently.
With my travel project complete, I’m back to my normal day to day, which is sad in some ways and comforting in others. It feels strange and small going back to our pre-trip normal after such a grand experience. My habits at home don’t include walking to a café each morning for coffee and a pastry or walking city sidewalks every day. They don’t include riding trains or visiting art museums, buying hats at a chappelerie or sitting in the shade of a lush garden by a trickling fountain with beautiful bronze and marble sculpture. They don’t include trying to capture all of these new experiences in writing.
Instead, I eat my overnight oats each morning. I journal by the window with a cat in my lap, trying to think of something new to write about. I swim at 8am, longer sets than before my sabbatical, when I squeezed my workout into 30 minutes at 5:30am. I walk in our green neighborhood, down green Glade Road, through green Heritage park. Sometimes I draw in my sabbatical journal. I eat lunch at home while I watch birds, usually a smoothie bowl, or a black bean burger with avocado, or half a wheat bagel toasted with pepper jack and everything but the bagel seasoning, with avocado smashed on top. I water my plants. I go to a coffee shop to get out into the world, I lay on the couch and read. I write letters to friends.
My days are slower than our days on vacation, and not quite as stimulating. They don’t provide as much fodder for a creative project as the novelty of my travel journals did. But they are comforting, relaxing, and gratifying. I am trying to soak them up and enjoy them as much as I possibly can right now, because they are not truly regular life. That will begin again in two weeks, when my sabbatical ends and I return to what is actually, truly regular life. I’m starting to think about what habits I can take from sabbatical back into my working life, as this has, without a doubt, been the gift of a lifetime.
A pug is sitting at my feet looking up at me with pitiful eyes, hoping for a crumb of my iced lemon pound cake. The coffee shop is painted a soft green. A long cushioned bench upholstered in floral fabric lines the wall. The front window is framed by cascades of lilac and jasmine. In the back of the café is a flower shop. Two women chat in French as they strip leaves from stems under a ceiling of skylights. A sign on the wall above them says La Fleuriste. The espresso machine whirs. A demitasse spoon tinks in an espresso cup. A florist pours water into a pail and I hear it trickle like a faucet.
-June 11, 2025, Paris
Romantic is a soft, gauzy feeling. It is a blush, a glow. The ruffle of a petal or a skirt. It is the fall of light. It is the rush of love, the hope to create beauty, the glimmering of an ideal. Romantic cherishes what could be and softly, gently, attempts to make it real. In the attempt, it succeeds, if only for a moment.
I am prone to romanticizing. In my younger years, this romanticism could be painful. I wanted romance to last, whether the romance was that fluttery feeling of first being in love or the glowy feeling the golden glimmer of evening light gave. In my adult years, the ephemerality is part of its allure. Romance is special when it shows up.
When I was younger, I also could not square that romance could live alongside truths with harsher colors and harder lines — if the hard realities existed, and romance faded, then my romantic notions must be false. Boy was that a depressing thought. Now I know that life is made of both romance and the not so romantic, and that the hard elements make the romantic — which is just as real — that much more sublime.
I savor the romantic when I’m lucky enough to experience it: the moment will likely be fleeting. Our days in France were full of romantic moments, including these on my final day alone in Paris, from the fall of light in St. Sulpice cathedral, to the soft floral shelter of Cordelia’s Coffee Flower Shop, to the bright blue door of the apartment where Hemingway wrote words that made me want to visit Paris, to the masterful impressions of mood and light in paintings at the Musée d’Orsay.
Light in St. SulpiceCordelia’s Coffee Flower ShopI love the wind and the light in these sketches of Woman with a Parasol by MonetAnna Boch, CuilletteDetail from Henri-Edmond Cross’s Flight of the NymphsSo sad. Doctor Paul Gachet by Vincent Van Gogh.Portrait of the Artist, Vincent Van GoghThe Siesta, Van Gogh74 Rue du Cardinal LimoineErnest and Hadley Hemingway lived on the 3rd floor above the blue door. Hemingway wrote about this apartment in A Moveable Feast, which introduced me to the romance of Paris, and he lived here when he started writing about the Lost Generation in The Sun Also Rises.
The streets were quiet when we arrived around 9 or 9:30, and we walked through a green city park with tall trees and butterfly beds at its entrances. The sky was gloomy and grey, but we brought our hats and umbrellas, so we were prepared. I carried my tote and didn’t bring my camera. I didn’t want to spend all my time photographing and I didn’t want to hurt my back carrying my camera and two lenses. I carried my notebook, Boox, hat, and umbrella instead. And I have no regrets. Not now anyway. I might when I look at my phone’s photos of the castle and wish they were higher quality.
-Saturday June 7, 2025
I do have regrets. Sort of. I wish my photos from Ghent were better. At the same time, I do remember how much I loved just being present in the moment while we were there, feeling the mist on my skin, gazing out over the ramparts, feeling the solidity of the castle stone, taking care in the slickness of the castle walkways, thinking about the puddles and the chill dampness of the castle’s interior, and how miserable it would be to live there, except for the glorious fireplace that was big enough for me to walk into. I wouldn’t mind scooting a chair next to a blazing fire in that with a book and a glass of port. Pulling out an iPhone to snap pictures requires less concentration than a real camera with settings and lenses and whatnot, so a phone makes it easier to be present (and is much lighter to carry), but the photos definitely are inferior, especially since I never remember to clean my lens. Oh well.
After our son left our Brussels Airbnb to go back home to the States, my husband and I took the train to Ghent. Several trains run the 30 minute route each day. When we disembarked at Ghent-Sint-Pieters, we went outside the station and gaped at a vast bicycle parking lot we’d seen from the train. Then we passed through the station to walk towards the historic part of town where the castle is, and we saw even more bicycles. The circular park outside the station was filled with bikes packed frame to frame to frame. The medians of the streets that ran out from the circle like spokes on a wheel were packed frame to frame with bicycles.
Bicycles in Ghent
Ghent’s outer portions, other than the medieval city center, look like any city, really. Roads, sidewalks, square-edged buildings not made from ancient stone. We noticed a big difference at street level, though, especially on the larger boulevards. In Ghent and various other places we visited, there is not only a cobbled sidewalk, but a side…bike? as well. A bike lane, I guess we’d call it in the US, except these were part of the raised sidewalk rather than on the street itself. Being raised makes a big difference because bike lanes in the US are often full of broken glass and litter of the road. In Ghent, raised off the road and of equal width to the grey-white paver sidewalk, is a brick-red paver thoroughfare for cyclists. So the dedicated space for walking and cycling takes up as much or more surface area as the space dedicated to motor vehicles. And most of the motor vehicles we saw were busses or taxis rather than individually owned cars.
It was refreshing to experience infrastructure that showed a clear value for non-motorized transportation. The hardest part as a pedestrian was to remember that the red-bricked portion of the sidewalk was specifically for bicycles. We frequently heard the polite ding of a bicycle bell trying to make its way through.
I loved the bicycles everywhere.
Our destination in Ghent was the Castle of the Counts, a medieval castle that dates back to 1180. We walked in the rain through the modern parts of the city to get to the historic center where the castle and cathedrals were.
The sky was still spitting when we entered the castle, and the air was cold and damp even though it was early June. I was happy to get inside the castle for shelter from the wetness, but the stone walls added no warmth, and wisps of hair around my face curled in the chill humidity inside. Being there gave me a chance to feel the cold dampness I’ve read described in so many novels that take place before electricity.
We climbed spiral stone stairs to the ramparts where we looked through the slits and weapon openings to see the skyline of Ghent. The stone pathways glistened in the rain and looked slick. I put my umbrella up and listened to rain tick against it while I tried not to slip and fall off the castle wall into the courtyard below. I looked out over the Northern Europe cityscape, all bundled up in my sweater, jacket, jeans, and hat on a June day in Belgium.
Castle of the Counts, Ghent
Before our trip to Belgium, I had read somewhere about something something medieval and something something torture chamber. I didn’t remember specifics, so I didn’t realize that was where we were until we entered a room with what looked like a well in the middle of it. It was a dungeon hole. I looked down into it, into the hole where prisoners would be held in this stone-walled pit, and was reminded of a scene in a post-apocalyptic book I’d recently read where the dad pried open a door to a cellar full of writhing people being held there to be eaten. Both the scene in the book and this very real dungeon pit were chilling.
We entered a room filled with armor and weapons of the day, including a two-handed sword that was taller than me, and maybe even taller than my 6′ husband. I wondered if I’d even be able to lift the sword, much less wield it. Especially wearing my body weight in metal armor. Seeing these suits of armor and weaponry in their natural habitat of a medieval castle instead of in the sanitized space of a museum made them feel much more real. I was struck that specimens like this, as well as art from each time period, are what make it possible for modern creators to craft realistic representations of warfare and medieval life in cinema and novels. So much of what we saw looked familiar from movies, but this was the real thing.
Throughout the castle are cartoonish depictions of what happened in the torture chambers, or what I assume were torture chambers since neither of us listened to the audio tour the castle staff really wanted us to listen to. Beheadings. Boiling in cauldrons. Pegs through the tongue. It’s all very gruesome.
Lots of gore in the Castle of the Counts
By the time we emerged from the castle, the rain had blown through, and the sky was a beautiful, scrubbed-clean blue. We walked the historic district along the river, popped into a couple of cathedrals, and headed back to the train station, trying to remember to stay on the grey-white pavers of the sidewalk instead of the brick-red ones.
We stopped in the bakery directly across the street from our apartment to get a pastry. The line was out the door. The boulangerie smelled of warm golden crusts. They had great hunks of brown bread that they sliced slabs off of for people to purchase by the kilogram. Next to the line was a plexiglass partition where you could watch the industrial sized mixers with bowls the size of washtubs. I watched a great vat of dough be kneaded next to me. Round and round the paddle went. The baker, a young man in a flour-dusted navy blue apron and backwards baseball cap sipped coffee from a metal insulated cup covered with floury fingerprints.
– June 5, 2025
I felt relaxed in Brussels. Excellent beer abounded, and every meal came with frits (fries). On our first night, I ordered a Grimbergern Brune beer to go with my “typical” Belgian meal of Flemish beef stew which was made with Grimbergern Brune. I really wanted frits (fries) — I’d been wanting them since we’d gone to Lille two days earlier — and when I asked our server if the stew would come with frits, he said, “Everything comes with frits.”
Hell yeah!
I took one bite of the beef stew, and it transported me instantly back to childhood, to Mom’s beef stew on a winter night, leaning over our bowls around the family table. The stew in Brussels was rich and layered and velvety and hearty, especially on chilly wet night, with wind blowing and rain lashing us as we walked glistening cobbles. I sopped up the thick broth with my frits, which were golden crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, and perfectly salted. It was so good, I had an almost identical meal at a different restaurant on our second night, except this time the stew was made with Chimay Bleue, and so I ordered a Chimay Bleue to go with it. The quality was even higher than the first night’s meal, the beef tender and the broth dark and rich.
Brussels reminded me of Athens, Georgia, where I went to college, except Brussels is much bigger, speaks French, Dutch, and English, and is full of adults instead of college students. Brussels felt like Athens in that it’s edgy, kind of punk rock, and it feels like it would have a good music scene. On one of our walks around the city, my husband and I happened on a doorway with a sign over it that said La Porte Noir, The Black Door, with a brick stairwell that spiraled underground.
We of course investigated. We found ourselves in a dungeon-like bar with a bunch of unknown-to-us beers on tap. I asked the bartender for a recommendation for a dark beer. He said Lupulus Hibernatus. I said yes. The logo is a wolf passed out on on its back, pouring the last drop of beer in its mouth.
Our son loved Belgium. In his 2 days there, he ate waffles on four separate occasions. As soon as we dropped our stuff at our Airbnb, we found a cool coffee place nearby that serves waffles as a side to savory brunch in the same way we serve toast in the US. The brunch waffles came with spreads — some savory, some sweet — rather than syrup. A few hours later, he got a second waffle, this one covered in Nutella, banana, strawberries, and chantilly cream. He got it at one of the scores of waffle places near the Grand Place central square. In every direction just off the square, every other door you walked by smelled like waffles and had their own spin on toppings or presentation.
As with Paris and Lille, we walked and walked and walked. I felt like I was going to walk holes through the soles of the cheap white sneakers I bought for the trip. I got tired of carrying stuff after a while. Walking around Brussels, and on our day trip to Bruges, I didn’t take my camera, just my phone. I didn’t feel like carrying my backpack all day long, and my tote was already full with an umbrella, notebook, ereader, and sometimes sweater. So my photos aren’t as crisp or high quality as I’d have liked, which is a bummer, but.
But the Fritbar made up for it.
In Bruges, we walked a lot, and we stopped a lot for snacks. Our son wanted another waffle, which he got — this time with strawberries — and after that, he wanted a salty snack. He wanted frits.
Lucky for us, there was a place whose entire menu was frits, sauces, and beer: Fritbar. Our server was a lively, funny man with a German accent who was very involved in our orders. I ordered a dark beer on draft, and he said, “Oh, I have something even better for you, it will make you fly somewhere you’ve never been before.”
Of course I said yes. Bring me whatever you recommend. Our son said, One for me too, please. When he brought the beers, Straffe Hendrik Quadruple, our server poured them into the goblets tableside. He started with the bottle touching the glass’s rim, then lifted the bottle in the air to create a long stream from the bottle to the glass, swirling the goblet as he poured to build up the perfect head which was probably 2 inches thick.
The beer was strong, dark, and hearty, and I loved it. Our server kept stopping by our table to check on me, his eyes twinkly with mirth, telling my husband and son to watch and wait. The beer did feel wonderful, and I smiled at the fun the server was having, but I thought, he’s making a bigger deal than this is going to be. Then it snuck up on me, in the same way the anise drink did in Istanbul, where suddenly I felt high as a kite, and thought thank god I don’t have to drive anywhere because I would be incapable, and I might not even be capable of walking, and I laughed until my eyes watered, and my son and husband laughed, and our table was joyous, and our server stopped by and got a huge kick out of it all. I probably made his whole shift. Then, just like the anise drink in Istanbul, after about 5 minutes the high mellowed, and I just felt happy and content and soft around the edges.
As we drank our foamy delicious beer and dipped our perfectly fried and seasoned potatoes (I got sweet potatoes) into various sauces (our son and I got truffle mayo), I thought, why has nothing like this taken off in the US? It seems like everything we love best. All this place served was French fries, sauces, and beer*. I can’t believe every college town in America doesn’t have a Fritbar.
*I realized later that they also serve burgers and other stuff.
Our son loved walking in the rain on the cobbled streets of Brussels, and he loved the architecture in the central square. He saw it in the day and requested to go back after dark. He wanted to see the buildings lit up and the lights shining on the wet cobbles against the darkness of night.
Brussels Grand Place
I personally loved the Justice palace and the ferris wheel.
Palais de Justice, Brussels
My husband, son, and I took the train to Bruges, where we walked among canals with greenery tumbling over brick and stone walls, ornate cathedrals, bicycles with baskets and teenagers riding double on the cobblestones, and bike bells gently dinging to ask all the tourists to please make way. We ambled without aim, just turning down streets when they looked cute, or pointing ourselves towards tall spires.
