In between transition time

I have been hesitant to write anything about my life because I'm feeling so dang privileged right now. And I don't know if anyone wants to read about my life when they're struggling to deal with pandemic lockdown and smoke AQI off-the-charts and police brutality.

...While my biggest struggle was deciding which pair of shoes to pack for my upcoming transatlantic flight.

But some kind friends have reached out and asked for an update, so here it is!

Michal and I quit our jobs and sold our house in Klamath Falls in August. I am now living in my parents' basement in The Dalles while Michal bicycles across the Pacific Northwest. 

In a few weeks, we will hop on a plane and fly to Poland, where we hope to live for the next two years... or maybe more?!?

What's In A Name?

As I contemplate our move to Europe, one of the issues on my mind is language, and more specifically, names.
When I got married, I took my husband’s last name. I didn’t want to at first. I didn’t like the symbolism of becoming my husband’s property and therefore surrendering my own name and identity. These ideas were hard for me to articulate in those early days of our courtship, and I really wanted to marry him, so I did what he wanted. His father had died and he was the only son in the family, and he felt a huge responsibility to his surname.
Also, I liked the sound of his name - it was Slavic sounding and it went well with the sound of my first name.

However, to any English-speaker who grew up learning Spanish as a second language, the name Kawka looks like it should sound like the Spanish word for poop: caca.

When we get to Poland, I will no longer have to explain my last name to anyone. I can't tell you how many times I've been on the phone with customer support and I've spelled my name for them, and there's just this awkward silence. "Oh, that's unusual."  They can't say that it reminds them of the Spanish word for poop because their job is to be polite on the phone. Yeah. But I know what they're thinking.

In Poland, everyone knows what a kawka is. Kawka is the common name for a family of small blackbirds in the corvidae family. We might call them crows or jackdaws in English. Hence the title of my blog here: As The Crows Fly. We are the flying blackbird family!

Soon the flying Kawkas will be in Poland, the land where a "w" is pronounced like a "v" or "f" in English.

Franz Kafka, the famous writer, bears the same name as me, only he was born in Bohemia, aka Czech Republic, so he spells it with an F.