Our first summer as a family in America is everything we imagined it would be. Summer jobs, music concerts, driving lessons, Chipotle bowls, and seeing old friends on wonderfully warm evenings that make even busy weekdays feel like vacation. We planted lavender and basil and pink flowers on our balcony, and in the evenings, the trees outside are a summer symphony of cicadas. Sometimes, after the sun goes down, we take our bowls of mint chip and moose tracks and sit out there with Gus, who loves to laze in the heat and catch bugs.

There are so many memories of wonderful summers!

Every night, the Quartedeck simmers with a beachy crowd driving nice cars through our neighborhood, and it’s amazing really, to see the cars these people drive. The waiters dump piles of crabs on tables covered in butcher paper, and bring plates of golden hush puppies and onion rings. Picking blue crabs on a hot summer night is a journey, not a destination, spent talking, sipping something cold, and watching the stars come out. When we’re sitting here with our friends and teenagers, half a block from home, there is no place we’d rather be.

We live 100 yards from the Sunset Parade at Iwo Jima, where the Marines salute our country in a silent rifle drill every Tuesday. The Carillon rings out bell concerts over the park, and we hear taps playing every night at 11pm. We use the scooter to get to work and cruise through Georgetown, and every Sunday morning I run past Arlington Cemetery and the Kennedy Center. It’s like playing a dream part in a glamorous life, except it’s not an illusion. It’s real!

The sun is so bright in the summer. It’s like another life happens once school and work are over, and it feels like there’s time to do everything. Shucking corn and roasting salmon, and making fresh tomato sauce sprinkled with basil and tiny pearls of mozzarella cheese. The boys rowed and went to the gym, saw Imagine Dragons and Green Day, and worked at a bunch of amazing rooftop pools, lifeguarding with Europeans from Turkey, Poland, and Bulgaria. We saw fireworks over the Capitol on July 4th, kayaked on the Potomac, ate prime rib at a tavern in Williamsburg, walked through the Chatauqua Institute, and saw the grave of a great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Ebeneezer Cheney, who fought in the Revolutionary War.

We live right now in one of the world’s most amazing places, and summer only makes it more so. For Gus too! I think he misses his Bulgarian balcony and doesn’t like air-conditioning very much, but he makes the best of it by sitting around in a bean bag. Mike made him a cat door so he can go out and sit with the flowers :).

And so, the adventure continues, one step at a time, weaving new threads into a tapestry whose story is as yet untold. It would be daunting, to think the story is just getting started, but that is probably the truth….