Parent of Adults is my invitation to compare notes on life beyond the empty nest. Learn more on the About page or subscribe now, for free. I’VE JUST RETURNED from two weeks in Granada, Spain. Rael and I planned this trip to get a taste of what it’s like to live there. We have no imminent plans to move, but we’re scoping out different versions of our future. One of the more ambitious possibilities is living in another country for a time. Sam, our 26 year-old son, joined us in Spain. He’s between jobs and decided to take this as an opportunity to explore his own possibilities abroad.
The idea of living outside the US hasn’t always been on my radar. I love to travel and my family hails from four continents, but home is here, where my people are. That hasn’t changed. But in the years since my kids have grown, my relationship to home has expanded. I first noticed this, oddly enough, through my connection to the birds that frequent our backyard feeder. From These Particular Birds, a post I wrote in 2023:
There’s more to it, but the bottom line is that the idea of home has cracked open for me and I’m drawn to investigate…perhaps by living abroad for a time? We didn’t sightsee much in Granada; we mostly just lived. We rented a small apartment in El Albaicín — the hilltop Moorish quarter — and took language classes at a nearby school. Sam and I took a beginner class to refresh our high school Spanish; Rael, who’s further along, took advanced classes.
We spent the afternoons doing homework and grocery shopping, cooking simple meals, and hanging our laundry to dry on the rooftop clothesline. Sam joined a local gym and quickly became a regular. I brought along my ink pens and a small watercolor set and practiced travel sketching. (Sketching is a revelation. I’ll share more about it in a future newsletter.)
We spent the rest of our time wandering around town and taking it all in. We got familiar enough with the geography and bus system to get around pretty well. We became friendly with our teachers and the local shopkeepers. We found a favorite neighborhood coffee place. We ran into people on the street we’d met before. By the time I left, I could begin to make out a glimmer of that newly-expansive sense of home. As vacations go, it was uneventful, but as experiences go, it was incredibly rich, especially because we got to share it with Sam. All three of us are on the cusp of something new, even if none of us are sure exactly what (or where) that is. ❖ Comments are open to all for a week after publication. For unlimited access to comments + the full archive, become a paid supporter. 🗄️ RELATED READING
🔗 NOTES OF NOTE
Thanks for reading. Have you lived in another country or thought about it? I’d love to hear about it (or anything else) in the comments. 🩵
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Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Will our next home be in another country?
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