Odds & Ends #13 - The Melina Edition
Well, by now Melina and I have settled into a routine during the week. I’m no longer surprised to wake up and find that I have someone else living in my house. Each work/school day, she makes and eats her breakfast, I pack her lunch and she bikes off to school while I either work from home or go into the office. When we get home in the evenings, we make dinner and eat together, then she does homework while I putz around.
She helps me with so much around the house: cooking, cleaning, the dishwasher, grocery shopping. It’s so nice to have someone to split the chores with. We’re a team. I’ve found myself referring to things as “OUR house” and “WE need to do such-and-such”.
We continue to have the darndest conversations over the dinner table. (One of the requests her parents made of me is that we eat together for dinner.) The other day, she offered to go to church with me. “Have you ever been to church?” I asked her, knowing that she has no faith background at home.
“Yes, I’ve gone with my grandmother. She is Catholic.”
“Well, the Protestant version of church is quite different in the U.S., “ I told her.
“What is the difference between Catholic and Protestant?” she asked. Oh boy.
So off we go to church today to find out. That is probably going to be another post for another day.
She continues to struggle a bit with the language. Oh, she’s 99% fluent, but our English idioms and metaphors give her a little trouble. Last night we went to a Texas Rangers game, and she saw a big sign in the outfield. “Shasta, what does ‘Bring the heat’ mean?” So far I’ve had to explain what “Pulling your leg,” “mystic,” and “raining cats and dogs” means just this week alone.
Rangers game
And other things are new to her, such as the overall friendliness of Texans. The other day we were driving through the neighborhood, and I waved at a lady getting into her car. Didn’t think anything of it. “Shasta, do you know that person?”
“Nope,” I said. Her forehead crinkled a little as she processed that.
We’ve both discovered a thing for Agatha Christie, so we are making our way through Kenneth Branaugh’s Hercule Poirot movies — with English subtitles. We love Taylor Swift too, so we giggled our way through buying tickets to her Eras Tour movie coming out soon.
We no longer have long silences where we don’t speak. We love to talk, talk, talk. Her sense of humor has come out, and it’s razor sharp and dry. Yet she’s so innocently amazed at everything. We drove after dark last night coming back from the Rangers game. “It’s so beautiful!” she said of the night skyline and all the lights. Yes, DALLAS, to her, is beautiful. She, who comes from the land of the Eiffel Tower and Cannes and Nice and Lyon and Paris, thinks Dallas is beautiful.
This weekend is the week before Homecoming. We’ve had loads of fun getting her ready: dress and shoe shopping at the mall (her first trip to an American mall, which stunned her); mum shopping, which stunned ME, and finally, getting her toes done. Her first pedicure. “I love them!” she said, wriggling her cute little toes.
Melina’s first pedicure
She is an absolute gift to me and the world. If there’s one thing I want to impress upon her when she leaves the U.S. in May, it’s knowing what a blessing she has been to me, and what gift her life is to everyone she meets. God has knocked it out of the park with Melina.
