Hello, my name is Abby Smith and I used to write a blog called “Very Simple, Very Easy Very Good. It had a cute tag line; ” I write about the complexities of the simple life”. It was actually about what happens when ridiculously idealistic people move to another country without enough money and try to live an ridiculously unrealistic “self sustainable” life.

It was a pretty entertaining blog. Lots of humor, tragedy, beauty, loss, and hard won triumphs. Mexico made writing a blog easy, there was mayhem most weeks(mayhem is great fodder for blog posts) and I didn’t have an job. I could put writing first and washing our underwear in the creek…whenever. As long as we had beans and tortillas I was free to create.

It was great.

Except for all the horrors, the poverty, and what I felt was the likelihood that my husband was working himself to death.

So, we moved to Nicaragua. We got real jobs, the kind you get paid for! Our life now is the antithesis of our lives in Mexico. We live in a castle in comparison, with a pool and an ocean view, we have unlimited wine, hot water,  and electricity(most days :).  There are no snipers joining us for dinner, no vicious old neighbors, no babies to fail.

It’s great.

Except, we arrived in Nicaragua with a desiccated marriage, deteriorated health, and moral quandaries.  How do you begin again with someone you’ve suffered so much with you both feel dead inside? What does one do with tattered ideals? How does a political expatriate reconcile living in a US bubble in a third world country?

So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the two years I have been absent from vsvevg: resurrecting a relationship, revamping my belief systems, and ultimately myself. I like to do that about once a decade.  I guess that’s what this blog will be about for the time being, and probably some travelogue, some books, art…maybe even a bit poetry.

Now that things are truly, Very Simple, Very Easy and Very good.