Forty Three Years - Quarenta e Tres Anos - - - of a Joyful and Unpredictable Journey

 Forty-Three Years of a Joyful and Unpredictable Journey

We were young and full of energy.  

Ponta de Mangue

Our honeymoon left some of our family concerned.  It was not to be the glamorous place where the rich celebrate their weddings but in the driest and poorest region of Brazil.   “O Sertão do Nordeste (the northeast hinterland).”    

 
7 Cidades National Park

As I reflect back I thought it was like visiting a different sort of Narnia - where it´s always hot summer but never Christmas.  Adriana´s love for geography, history, geology, natural medicine… and my love for the Sertão where I spend a part of my childhood took on an unforgettable expedition through wonderful landscapes, unknown national parks, street markets, and small towns of this beautiful and forgotten land. 

Our first Christmas was celebrated at a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius (104 F) in a small town in the state of Piaui.  Images of people and places that do not fade from our memories.  I saw in their countenance the faces of my great grandparents: burnt by the scalding sun, fighting for survival and the determination to keep going.  

Inspecting Cave Paintings

Then we returned to Recife to a normal life, Adriana pursuing her MD  degree and I working as an engineer.   Then life became more exciting when little birds came to our nest when Ana e Priscila were born.  And what seemed to be a settled, happy and quiet life in a great-weather country, was quickly changed when we moved to England – of all places (I had fallen in love with England as I started reading  Lewis).   Adriana and Ruth came to make life even more interesting.  

And the Santa Cruz jersey went with us.

We lived by the day.

Manchester was another sort of Narnia – closer to the original one – always winter and rainy but never Christmas.   But with City and United just around the corner football provided an entertainment much necessary for relaxation from the PhD work. We watched several games at the old Manchester City Maine Road Stadium with the kids. 

Then life turned us around again – immigration to the US, experiencing the very different lives of Iowa, California, Virginia, Florida, Michigan, and then Eindhoven (Netherlands) provided plenty of stories to tell.  The little birds then took on their own flights and dreams.

Right now, once again without any previous plans, like all other destinations, we landed in a small town in the South of Minas Gerais.  Itajubá has also provided us with meaningful work, good friends, and many challenges for our near future.

The Dawn Treader - Our Travel Companion in the USA

In all these adventures I have had a faithful, strong, beautiful, supporting wife. I am so grateful to God for such a woman.  

My beautiful bride, wife, mother - - 

"A good wife contains so many persons in herself.  What was not Joy to me?  She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding this all-in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, a fellow soldier.  My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have had good ones) has ever been to me … Solomon calls his bride Sister.  Could a woman be a complete wife unless, for a moment, in one particular mood, a man felt almost inclined to call her Brother?"

Iowa - Where the USA Voyage Started

And together we will continue living, loving, kayaking … - - - and saying like Reepicheep:

“[Our] own plans are made. While we can, we sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails us, we paddle east in our coracle. When she sinks, we shall swim east with our four paws. And when we can swim no longer, if we have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world into some vast cataract, we shall sink with our nose to the sunrise.”

Paulo and Adriana – December 17, 2020 AD

Love 

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 

Love never fails. 

And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. 

But the greatest of these is love.

2020 - At Narnia - - - Images of how we got through the pandemic - so far

 2020 - Life Has Never Been Normal

 "We are mistaken when we compare war [calamities] with “normal life.” Life has never been normal.”

Adriana and I want to wish you and your family

 Merry Christmas and a Happy 2021 

Images that helped us to get through the pandemic at Narnia - - - 

.... so far 

Where it´s always spring and always Christmas

"... only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little way away from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible.  ... 

You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her. Come out, look back, and then you will see

this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas: this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads. How could you ever have thought that this was the ultimate reality? How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. 

Meet her and know her. If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as the scientists tell us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creature, this ogress, this hoyden, this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch. But the theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. 

The ‘vanity’ to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence. She will be cured in character: not tamed (Heaven forbid) nor sterilised. We shall still be able to recognise our old enemy, friend, playfellow and foster-mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more, herself. And that will be a merry meeting." 

Adriana and I are doing well - - - Ana, Priscila, Adritha, and families (9 grandchildren) are doing great.  Ruth is staying with us for a few months before she returns to Philadelphia.

Before the COVID Pandemic