Over the last twenty years and many visits that will be described in future posts, my husband, John and I fell in love with France, in particular with the south of France, Provence and Occitanie. The plane trees, the pace of life, the hewing to certain traditions, like Sunday family meals, the beauty and enjoyment of the outdoors, meant that whenever we traveled there, we just felt a lightness. We breathed easier.

Eventually, we began to dream of living there part of the year, for reasons we explain in the Why posts on this substack, reasons that are both specific to us and also general to others who fall in love with another place or country. This CNN article, like many others, explains that the idea of retiring abroad has been growing in popularity:

As time went on, we became more and more serious about our dream, investigating and making tentative plans. In 2022, our plans became more firm. As academics (we’re writers and creative writing teachers), we knew the first steps of any project were research, research, and research so we started doing that (in my, Stephanie’s, opinion, that’s also part of the fun). Occasionally, we also shared our plans with friends, many of whom replied, “ that’s interesting. We’d like to see how you do it. We might like to do that ourselves.” And so the idea of this substack was born, along with dividing it into “how” posts and “why” posts. Of course, being an early Gen Xer who wore out her copies of the How and Why Book of Dinosaursand the How and Why Book of Rocks and Minerals, in particular, an overall theme became immediately apparent. Fortunately, my son’s partner, Maddie Moss, is an extremely talented artist and graphic designer (maddiemmoss@gmail.com if you’d like to inquire about her services), who was able to bring this theme to life for us.

In the beginning, we plan to post at least one “Why” and one “How” post per week, although once we are able to settle in here, in the future, it might be more like monthly or bi-monthly.

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