HOME Home is more than a mere geographic reference; the emotional significance of home is much deeper than that. We seem to need a place of sanctuary where we can have a break from the inevitable stresses of interacting in a larger world. For us, home has always been a very special place. A relocation within a native homeland carries stresses enough but relocating to a different country only multiplies the dislocation issues involved. Among the complexities of a major relocation to a far distant place is the disruption to a comfortable feeling of where home now actually exists. It seems accepting a place to be called home does not come instantly. That feeling only seems to grow over time with an overlaying accumulation of events and emotional experiences that provide reassurance. In adapting to Expatriate life, as expected, some additional time has been required for us to reach a level of emotional comfort in a new and different place before it has started to really feel like home. In a recent post, we discussed our plan to return to California this past summer to not only visit family and friends but to sort through items left in storage, dispose of some things and then ship the remainder to Ascoli Piceno. Sorting and deciding what to ship and what was to be disposed of was both physically and emotionally exhausting. But we had reached a stage of comfort with our lives in Ascoli that having items that have been part of our lives for so long around us again would further solidify the feeling of establishing a new home. As expected, the dynamics of accomplishing the shipment were complex. Matters proceeded more comfortably on the U.S. end than in Italy. More on that in a separate commentary of our experience under the heading of ‘Logistics II.’ Bound for the U.S., we left Rome by air in mid-June for New York. We returned to Ascoli during the first week of August – seven weeks on the go and just a couple of weeks before the earthquake experience Arlene recently wrote about. We started with a visit with my brother, the lady in his life plus our nephew and his family....

LOGISTICS II Sometime back we wrote about a series of logistical considerations we decided upon in the process of becoming Expatriates in Italy. That included where to concentrate our search for a location in which to live, whether to rent or purchase a home and whether or not to buy a car. And now, after a little over three years of living in a Provincial Capital, ‘off the beaten track’ near the Adriatic Coast of Central Italy, our continuing assessment of the decisions reached in each of those areas is that the results have continued to work well for us. When we approached developing the criteria to use in making logistical decisions, the core factors we used were; to aim for more simplicity in our lives, being mindful of cost issues in an economy we were unfamiliar with and attempting to reduce sources of stress and frustration. One of the means of achieving that latter objective was to reduce, as much as possible, the necessity of having to interface with the Italian bureaucracy. As it turns out, that latter objective was even more prescient than we realized at the time. The following example will illustrate the point. The experience we are about to relate involved bringing our remaining personal items from California to our new home in Italy. In the process of the relocation to become Expats, we deferred the decision on bringing furniture and household items with us to Italy until we were more sure of what might better fit into our adopted homeland lifestyle. There were also concerns at the time involving the extended family that made firm, long-term planning difficult. So, we decided to leave some items in storage in California that would also provide a fallback reserve ‘just in case’ we were to return to the U.S. As it turns out, not bringing household items with us in an early stage of becoming Expats in Italy, created an unforeseen complication. Unfortunately, we did not realize at the time there is a finite window of one year once immigrating into Italy within which personal items can be imported from outside the European Union to avoid import duty. We waited over three years. That turned out to...