If I could save time in a bottle,
The first thing that I’d like to do,
Is to save every day,
Till Eternity passes away,
Just to spend them with you.

Reading that lyric, you might assume that Jim Croce was writing to a lover, but I think of Girona when I hear that song. And I have good news: you can save time in a bottle – sort of. We do it with champagne (or cava) corks.

When we left Portland we had four huge bottles: the tallest was almost four feet, all filled with champagne corks from bottles we’d popped open over the years. We sold the entire collection – corks, bottles, everything – to one estate-sale buyer who thought it made a decorating statement.

When we arrived in Girona, chilled cava was waiting in the fridge thanks to our landlord Jeannette. We bought a vase the next day (that’s it pictured at the top of this post) and began filling it with the cork from Jeannette’s bottle. Today, it contains twenty-five corks and appropriately (I leave Girona in two days), it’s full.

There’s three months of time in that bottle.

We won’t take it with us, but just having filled it will help us remember a magical spring in Girona: an inspirational city, a romantic coastline, cherished friends; and, well, yes, some unexpected medical perils. Aside from those, our time in Girona was so perfect we almost worry about the rest of our expat adventure. Can it get any better? Can it even be equal?

Louise is in the Canary Islands. I’m still in Girona. Our reunion will occur at the Barcelona airport Sunday night. We’ll arrive in Greece Monday morning. There may be another cork bottle (retsina?) in Greece, but the time represented by the corks in the picture above is pretty much time of wishes come true:

If I had a box just for wishes,
And dreams that had never come true,
The box would be empty,
Except for the memory,
Of how they were answered by you.