La Forge du Bonheur

OK. I'll be honest. I did not have a fabulous time in Scotland. Which I hate admitting because it makes me feel like a spoiled annoying brat complaining about my oh so hard life in which I travel the world and stay in Scottish resort villages. Cry me a river. For real. And maybe I wasn't ready to admit that in my last post. OK, that was another lie. Got to stop with the lying. I was absolutely not ready to admit that in my last post.

But now I'm in France, and I am ready to admit it. To myself and to my blog. And to God and to THE WORLD. Et cetera. And when I really get down to the meat of it, clear through the detritus in my mind, I can come up with two reasons why I did not have a fabulous time in Scotland. One: I got homesick. I missed Callie tremendously (yes I know. I'm a loser. I embrace it), I missed having my life at my fingertips, and wearing clean clothes, and talking to my best friend through a medium other than email, and watching the Food Network, and sleeping in my own, deliciously comfortable bed, and looking at my classes for next term, and about a million other completely trivial things that make up my little world in Bryn Mawr. And reason number two, which is the big one is this sad little statement that frustrates me to no end: I felt fat.

Seriously. When I really scrape away all my bullshit reasons for why I didn't have a fabulous time in Scotland, that one remains. I felt fat. And somehow, I'm still not strong enough to let that go. I WISH that I could have stepped out of my body and given myself a huge knock on the head. Or at least given myself some rose colored glasses through which I could view myself and my imperfect body.

And it makes me feel spoiled and awful and humiliated to admit that after all these years, I let that awful, sick side of my personality take over a whole week of my honeymoon. And now that I'm in France, and every day I can feel my body and heart normalizing, it's kind of pissing me off. But for now, France is so lovely, and our hosts are so gracious, and the food is SO fresh and YUM, that it's hard to stay angry.

And pieces of our week in Scotland really were wonderful; but that's really all they were: pieces. And that is distressing and embarrassing, but I'm trying not to dwell on it, but to really soak up this last week of our honeymoon.

This week, we're staying in the Loire Valley, in Loches, at the home of an old high school teacher of mine and his wife, who is, thank goodness, a French teacher (all of my French seems to have evaporated from my mind. OOPS. Bad news for graduate exams. But I'll think about that later). The house is this fantastic six hundred year old building that used to be a blacksmith's workshop, a forge. Thus, they've christened it, fittingly, La Forge du Bonheur (the forge of happiness). And that it is. Here's to a magnificent last week.