I grew up in Oregon so I know about damp. But as the winter grew colder in Nova Oeiras, I retrieved my Birkenstock sandals from under the bed and discovered that they had turned green from mold. Portuguese music and poetry is full of the language of the sea. The seagull hovers over many songs making its plaintive cry against the background of the crashing waves. The Portuguese, pushed to the edge of the Atlantic refuse to look over their shoulder at the Spanish and instead wallow in saudades, an elusive longing for home, or the sea, or lost love, or all three. It was saudades that first drew me close to the Portuguese heart, like the smell of cigarette smoke in your clothing, wet wool on a foggy day, or the laughing scree of a gull as you sit on the back step trying to scrub the mold off your shoes. Walking the streets of the lower quarter, the Baixa, in Lisbon, listening to the clang of the street cars, watching old men sipping beer at a greasy counter behind a steamy window, homesickness settled damply on my soul. I began collecting old dictionaries. And I mean these dictionaries were old. My first purchase in the Baixa was a Candido de Figueira from the 1940s. I was just getting started. Why the Portuguese, who love their language the way Americans love their pets, would so carelessly abandon dictionaries to the musty back rooms of livrarias was beyond me. Nineteenth century. Eighteenth century. Seventeenth century. I was soon holding a book in my hand that predated JS Bach. I began dreaming of becoming a lexical etymologist. The definition of computador in one of these old tomes was, alguem que computa, “someone who computes.” All those wrinkly old dictionaries have followed me from house to house, smelling damply in the cold season and turning dry as an old leaf in the furnace of a Tete summer. I have the finest collection of stinky Portuguese dictionaries in Mozambique. Or possibly there is a lexicographical soulmate out there who has a similar collection.

While the Portuguese of today were hiding behind barred doors, and the Portuguese of yesterday were singing love songs to seagulls, strangers and refugees like ourselves were rattling around on the windy streets and meeting in a basement on Sunday for church. Church in Carcavelos was a clandestine affair involving people joined only by their need to be in church and the Portuguese language. There were hardly any Portuguese. But the place was full of Brazilians, and Cape Verdians, and Angolans, and New Jersey Portuguese. The songs were all loose translations of whatever people were singing in English-speaking churches. Perhaps had I been Catholic I might have met a Portuguese worshipper. Still it was a joyful time to be with these happy people with the lively lousy music and forget for a while our diaspora existence.

Driven frantic by our suburban solitude, Hilary and I took to heading out on adventures with all our clothes, sippy cups, maps, camera and crackers stuffed into the double stroller, and going somewhere. Anywhere! We had no car so we traveled by train. We visited the ancient walled city of Obidos. (Jim scolded me for pronouncing O like O. Its AW-bi-DAWSH). We went to Evora, and wandered the streets in search of housing and pizza. I fancied myself as a photographer and tortured myself to get up the courage to take pictures of people. My first solution was a telephoto lens with a 2x coupler allowing me to snap surreptitious shots of people without their knowing it. This made for a lot of blurred photos as I would focus hurriedly, shoot and then snatch the camera beneath my jacket. The other method was to let my kids play in the foreground and pretend to take pictures of them while getting the lively expressions of Portuguese people laughing at my children’s antics. If I had thought about it, I might have reasoned that we don’t exactly like strangers to take pictures of us. It’s one of the glories of being a tourist that you can shove your camera in anyone’s face and steal their soul. Some of these people were so picturesque. Especially in the villages. Little wrinkled ladies dressed in black. They were practically ethnic. On the Lisbon shoreline I caught a picture of an old man with a flat cap looking exactly like a fisherman. Quaint! Had I only known that the lifeblood of a photo is the brief connection between photographer and subject: the hopeful glance of the photographer and the resignation and revelation of the subject.

Our kids were oblivious to culture shock, Portuguese coldness, or uncomfortable mattresses. They tumbled around on Roman ruins, Made friends in every playground in our suburb and charmed the scowls off every face in the vicinity. Elle, Henry and Andrew were quite incapable of being stopped by a language barrier. They chatted and giggled their way through the dark night of their parents’ soul never realizing how rotten life was. Thanks to some easygoing babysitters, Hilary and I finally got out of our funk and attended a real Portuguese class in a real school. It was a real-ish school. The attendance was low so we got grouped in with the beginning class whose sole student was a Korean who spoke English even more impossible than our American dialect. Our tutor was a true Portuguese patriot. She loved her country, its cuisine, its music and art in a way only a zealot can. She glowered at us from the precipitous height of her black leather boots and winced every time we did harm to her beloved tongue. Classes settled into a comfortable pattern of our teacher lecturing on the glories of the Portuguese language and then asking me or Hilary to translate what she had just said into English for the Korean fellow. We only lasted in the course a month, but our tutora still hovers in my subconscious daring me to misconjugate the language of Camões, or say something snide about Portuguese cooking.

During our nine months in Portugal, we had a regular stream of visitors. Grandparents on both sides visited to see their babies and sample exotic Portuguese culture. My sister and her husband came for the World Fair and had fun, I think. I arranged for our relations to stay in a palace in Sintra while our family stayed in a more modest pensão called Casa Alegre, “Happy House” which was run as you might expect by a very dour man named Mr. Happy. Our future directors, Tom and Jan, visited us for a few days and we discovered that salmon steaks were the same price as ground beef so we had an enormous feast with all the other future Bible translators who were tucked into various corners of the Lisbon metropolis. That was just fine with Tom and Jan. They loved Portugal. They had visited here for three months and had a terrific time. Their visit was on the heels of our language supervisor’s visit but their recommendation was simply, “Enjoy Portugal!” We did our best, visiting palaces, eating pasteis de natas at the Monastery of Bethlehem. I dutifully collected a stack of Portuguese pop music Cds that were given away in the Sunday papers, and hunted for a complete set of Portuguese-language Tin Tins and Portuguese translations of Maigret mysteries. I fell in love with the poetry of Eugenio Andrade and the voice of Dulce Pontes. After several months of battle, I successfully learned how to pronounce, eu the personal pronoun, “I.” It is not YO, like those crude Spaniards would have it. It’s not AY-YU like some robot might say it. Eu is in fact a four syllable word pronounced without either opening or closing your mouth. It is the sound of the tide among the rocks, and the sound of a seagull’s wings. Eu is a mixture of pain and delight and the sigh of isolation you can only feel among the ghosts of an old city.

Just as the weather was improving I got it into my head that we had learned enough Portuguese and should go to England for the summer. It was a fatal mistake. We missed the most beautiful time of the year in Portugal. Well, not in Lisbon where it is stifling and dusty and all the residents have fled to the mountains. But we also missed the time when our language skills were really starting to show. Not only that but we went to England during a time they call “Summer” which is almost as wet as a Portuguese winter but without the consolation of being able to sing fado to relieve your misery.