Clara: All In

So Clara came home from her school concert Thursday night and despite a triumphant turn alongside her classmates, performing a traditional North Vietnamese folk dance, she was bummed. We had watched her palling around with her friend Phuong Anh and others; she was totally at home and in the moment. And yet: “I can’t do this…” Do what? “I can’t believe I have to leave all my friends.” This was exactly what she had moaned about in December before leaving for Vietnam, only she had referred to her New Gloucester friends, and how she’d miss them, and why did we have to be away for FOUR months? Well, that’s one of the reasons we love Clara: She’s all in, all the time. We’re very proud of her, and Silas, for the way they’ve adapted to life here, made new friends, traveled around, tried new things. But we were more worried about Clara because, well, she’s 10 and she’s not so computer literate that she can stay in good touch with Louisa, with Melody, with Suzie and Clementine — or not so well as her big brother does with his friends. But she has done pretty well ramping up her computer skills, and she has done better than that making new friends here. After the concert, when we’d had a chance to snuggle and talk about all this, she left me with this admonishment (without the slightest irony): “We have to come back. And we have to stay for more than four months.”