on new eyes. . .

When you first move to a new place, it is easy to write.

You see everything with new eyes.

The food. The colors. The curve of the road. The beauty of the valley. The nuance in the day to day. These eyes are the gift of a new place – everything is in sharper focus. Nothing seems mundane.

And then over the course of years (almost 5 for us here), the new becomes home. The adventure in the jaunt up the hill becomes a daily walk. The maze of traffic becomes your normal drive.

We have had several new families move into Kijabe in the last few months, and their eyes are fresh – they see the beauty in the weather, hear the roar in the midnight wind, and the flavor in the chicken and the mangoes. I love seeing them post pictures of things that I see every day but haven’t noticed in months. (photos from Cassandra Daggett our new neighbor below. . .)

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But with that comes the eyes that see the other things too. . . we were talking to friends last week about rats, and dust, and traffic, and waiting in line, and haggling and differences in timing here. It was all so new to them, but to us, just like the beauty and the wind, it has become a normal part of life. Something that drove us bonkers at first, but now is a trade-off for the other things that make this our home.

The stories that we told at the beginning seem mundane now, but this month, I want to return to the descriptions of the days – of every day life here in all is extraordinary ordinariness.

So, I am going to try to write everyday – to put into words and unwrap a little bit of the bits and pieces that make up our life here, and paint a picture of days that are no less profound, not just highs and lows, but who we are. . . .and perhaps, in the process, regain a bit of the new eyes that have dulled in the years we have been here.