ENGLISH LESSONS
A Widow Bit – May 30, 2010
By Mary Koch

            I wondered as I flew home after three weeks in England’s enchanting Cotswold region, where sheep graze amidst a patchwork of rolling green fields and each village is more picturesque and quaint than the last, would coming home be a letdown?

            After flying into Sea-Tac, I decided on the drive home to pretend I was accompanied by a visitor from England who was seeing Washington state for the first time.

            “We” headed east, catching a good view of Mount Rainier. The mountain wore a shawl of clouds, but its outline was visible and imposing. Snoqualmie and Blewett passes are two mountain corridors I routinely travel just to get where I’m going. Seeing them for the first time, we are in awe of the white-capped, forested mountains, close enough to reach out and touch.

            Descending from Blewett, the landscape abruptly changes, as if someone turned a switch. We are in the mighty gorge carved by ice, and nourished by the Columbia River. Thousands of acres of miraculously irrigated orchards climb halfway up rugged hillsides. We turn north at the confluence of the Columbia and the Okanogan, “my” river. Our homecoming coincides with that brief moment in spring when the Okanogan Valley’s arid hills are richly green. Thanks to automatic sprinklers, my yard is lush and blooming. How grand to see the familiar for the first time all over again!

            Now that I’m home, people are asking about my trip. I have plenty to ponder, yet little to say. Three weeks in a country are not enough to make you an expert, but I did learn three things.

            1) The British really do talk that way. I kept thinking I was on a stage set for Masterpiece Theatre, waiting for the director to call “Cut!” so everybody could start talking normally. Some of the accents are so broad, I couldn’t understand what people were saying. It was like visiting a foreign country!

            2) Due to the complexity of England’s amazing web of rural roadways, you need two people in the car to navigate. At least one of them will be wrong 50 percent of the time. And the roundabouts! I never did figure out who had the right-of-way nor why. Only a country that created the rules for the sport of cricket would dream up a traffic system so baffling. Wouldn’t you know, driving home I got tangled up in that infernal roundabout at the freeway exit to North Bend. I wished I really did have an English visitor riding along.

            3) The English have too much money. I’m talking coinage. England’s famous health system must be overrun with patients suffering back strain, weighed down by literal pounds of loose change in pockets and purses. There are no one-pound bills but one- and two-pound coins, all the way down to one and two pences (pennies). Stumped by the effort to figure out which was how much, I’d place a pile of coins onto the counter and invite cashiers to take what they needed.

            They sympathetically recognized I was a foreigner – I didn’t speak English.