On my 60th birthday, I signed a five-year lease on a home in Portugal.
Happy birthday to me.
It was September 12, 2024. A Portuguese address was required for our visa application, so months before I knew what it would feel like to wake here, shop here, walk here, or need a doctor here, I had a home here.
At least on paper.
I arrived on February 4, 2025.
Eleven days later, I wrote about what it had taken to leave.
I had given myself 77 days to empty a life accumulated over decades. Furniture went to family and friends. Possessions found new homes. What could not make the journey across the Atlantic was released. At the time, I thought I understood something about letting go.
I was only beginning.
A few weeks after arriving, family called me temporarily back to the United States. I returned to Portugal in April.
Perhaps even arrival is not always a single event.
The Things That Did Not Fit in the Boxes
My home sits on Portugal’s Silver Coast, about 700 meters from the Atlantic, with an estuary nearby and a forest bordering the fishing village. I arrived carrying considerably fewer possessions than I had owned three months earlier.
What I could not pack into boxes were my assumptions.
How quickly something should happen. What good service looks like. How a healthcare system should work. When dinner should begin. What belongs in a grocery store. How far is too far to walk. What constitutes inconvenience.
The hundreds of invisible measurements by which we decide whether something is normal. Portugal had agreed to none of them.
The country did not move. I did.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
Learning Portugal on Foot
I am still learning Portugal. I learn it on foot.
Walking is part of my daily practice. I regularly leave home and walk into neighboring towns. At that pace, places do not disappear between departure and destination. I notice gardens.
Doors. Pavements. Laundry. Construction. People tending small plots of land. The changing Atlantic. Which cafés are full and when. The places where neighbors stop to speak.
Last year, I extended that practice and walked the Portuguese Camino, a centuries-old pilgrimage route, from Porto to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
A country encountered at walking pace is difficult to reduce to an itinerary. You pass through communities rather than around them. The distance between two points becomes inhabited. Food tastes different when your feet have carried you to the table. Weather stops being something viewed through glass.
A hill is no longer scenery. It is a hill.
I also learn Portugal by train. I have traveled by rail to Porto, Lisboa, and the Algarve, passing through towns and villages I might otherwise never have encountered. From a train window, the country rearranges itself again. Places appear and recede. The landscape opens. I am reminded that the Portugal I know from my small place on the Silver Coast is only one Portugal among many.
And I learn Portugal by car.
We chose not to bring my Zeus Bronze “go-fast” car across the Atlantic, so driving here has meant rental cars. Each one makes me pay attention again: a different dashboard, a different feel, and then the Portuguese roads themselves. Signs, tolls, roundabouts, parking, routes, and the small conventions everyone else seems to know because they have had years to learn them.
I have not.
So I learn.
Learning to Be a Patient Again
Healthcare has required the same posture.
Since coming to Portugal, Serenity has become indispensable in helping me understand the nuances of navigating a healthcare system that was new to me, and in helping me establish care within both the public and private systems. Over time, something equally important has developed: a trusted relationship.
I can find information on my own. But what I have come to value is having people who know us, know our health history, understand the healthcare landscape we are navigating, and can help us make sense of what comes next, and answer the why.
I have sat across from primary care physicians and specialists. I have had blood drawn, mammograms, ultrasounds, scans, screenings, and other examinations. Along the way, I have learned where to go, when to arrive, what to bring, whom to call, and how one part of the system connects, or sometimes does not connect, to another.
Some things can be looked up.
Relationship is built.
Even with professional experience in health and wellness, I remain a person learning how to be a patient in a system that was not designed around my previous experience.
That has been useful to remember.
Expertise in one thing does not eliminate beginnerhood in another. Perhaps immigration is full of such reminders.
There is a temptation when we move somewhere new to become perpetual comparers.
Where I came from, we do it this way. Where I came from, this would be faster.
Where I came from, the store would have this. Where I came from, the doctor would...
The sentence can become a measuring stick we carry everywhere.
Comparison can help us understand difference. It can also prevent us from encountering what is actually in front of us.
I have become more interested in a different question:
What is this place teaching me about how life is lived here?
Curiosity Is a Way of Belonging
Curiosity has long been one of my practiced principles, personally and professionally.
So I observe. I remain open to what is, as it is, and long enough to discover that something unfamiliar may simply belong to a rhythm I have not yet learned.
Curiosity has also led me on a considerably less serious pursuit: finding a vegan version of Portugal’s beloved pastel de nata.
I think I may have found it.
I am continuing the search, purely in the interest of thorough research. My terrace has become another one of those classrooms.
Years ago, I owned a five-acre farm in Georgia. Today, I grow perhaps 20 percent of the food we eat on an expansive terrace in Portugal: sweet potatoes, Padrón peppers, greens, and whatever else I have a hankering for.
Five acres did not follow me across the Atlantic. The practice did.
So I learned the sun on this terrace. The wind. The water. What grows well here. What does not.
I adjusted.
Perhaps that is what I have been doing all along. Not abandoning who I was before Portugal.
Not attempting to reproduce her surroundings either. Adapting the practice to the place.
There is still much I do not understand. My Portuguese is a work in progress. I still encounter systems whose logic is not immediately apparent to me. I still get things wrong.
I hope that continues for a while.
Not the getting things wrong, necessarily. The learning.
At 62, I was recently asked what I am still learning. My answer was simple:
To become more deeply acquainted with the life that is here.
Portugal has given that answer a geography.
Somewhere between the Atlantic, the train carriage, the doctor’s office, the terrace, the neighboring towns, and the road beneath my feet, something has changed.
When I arrived, I was learning how to live in Portugal. Increasingly, I am simply living here.
The lease gave me an address.
The visa gave me permission to remain. Neither could give me belonging.
That part asks something of me.
