After 80 articles about life as an expat, V-grrrl has hung up her keyboard as she prepares to head back home and become an ex-expat.

Last week we received an enormous package of legal documents by international FedEx delivery: all the paperwork related to the purchase of a home in America. We spent days poring over them, calling back and forth to the U.S. to get questions answered and details worked out, and then on Friday, in the presence of an American notary, signed all the documents that would make us homeowners (and mortgage holders) once again.

It was a happy occasion and yet a strange one because we won’t actually get to move into our house until March 2008 and haven’t seen it since we put a contract on it in July. It was hard to muster a celebratory air when the transaction had such a surreal quality to it. It was a bit like marrying someone you’d only known for a week.

As I type this, our home is sitting in America waiting for us to occupy its space and discover its secrets:  how the light moves through its rooms at different times of day, which window reveals  the moon at night, the way the woods look in the fall and when they fill with snow in winter, the sounds of the neighborhood and the house, the squeaky hinges and creaky step, the room that is nicest to sit in in the morning.

As we move into our final stretch of time in Belgium, my mind is increasingly divided between where I am now and where I’m going, much as it was just before we started on our expat adventure almost three years ago and my imagination was trying to conjure pictures of what life would be like in Belgium.

I’ve now written more than 80 articles on my expat experiences for this site, detailing the visual and emotional nuances of my experience.  I think it’s time for me to pass the keyboard to a new writer, a new expat, someone who can offer a fresh perspective on a life lived abroad.

So au revoir, tot ziens, good bye. All the best to you on your life journey.


August 10, 2007  

©2007 V-Grrrl  and Veronica McCabe Deschambault. All rights reserved.

On behalf of myself and previous editors I would like to thank Veronica for her sterling work and wish her all the best in the next stage of the adventures of V-grrrl.
Paul Morris, Editor