Moving is a liberating bitch. You lose so much, you gain a lot. After 16 years of living in the USA, we moved back to Australia (where we were both born, raised, educated, worked, etc.) nearly four months ago. During Blogher’s month of blogging, I’m going to try to post every day on the theme, “What I’ve Lost, What I’ve Gained, ” starting with today’s short post:

You never know what you’ve got until its gone.

Given the nature of this series, you may have thought that today’s post will detail my sadness at missing my friends. Yes, I miss you all.

But what we miss here on a day to day, breakfast to breakfast, minute by minute, basis is bananas. Big yellow smelly bananas.

We don’t have them. We can’t afford Aussie bananas. Cyclone Yasi wiped out the Australian banana crop.

In the USA, we always had too many. Our fridge was full of frozen, brown ones that one day were destined for banana smoothies that the kids never learned to love.  Sometimes, a banana was only a few pennies.

In Australia, they’re a luxurious treat, which we salivate over.

In my first week back in Australia, I went grocery shopping in a jet-lagged haze and was shocked by the final bill, $80, for a handful of items.

A closer look showed I’d paid $11 for two bananas. At that price, they seemed more delicious than any other bananas I’d ever eaten.

Since then, I’ve been more careful about looking at prices and considering the conversion, pounds to kilograms. Sometimes, I buy a banana for lunch when I am out shopping. I am careful to hide the evidence.

When visitors come over for dinner, we don’t buy just expensive cheeses or wines. We buy bananas. Nothing says we’ve spared no expense for you, our special guest, than a $10 banana sitting among the inexpensive pathetic apples and the even cheaper, so boring, oranges.

“You bought a banana for our fruit salad!” guests exclaim. “You shouldn’t have.”

During casual visits to friends and families, I’ve seen folks rush to hide their bananas. A family member justified his purchase of expensive bananas as a medical necessity. It’s the potassium, you know.

Prices are falling (now only $6.98 a kilo. About $1 each on my last shop.) and slowly the banana as a luxury brand is receding. Bananas are no longer the Louis Vuitton of fruit, but more like Gap in the USA or Witchery in Australia.

But it’s been nice to be forced to look at something that we took for granted in the USA in a different light.

Bananas, I apologise. You were always there for me, and I didn’t love you enough.

Julie Power, a cofounder of MomstoWork.com, recently quit her full-time job and relocated her family from Bethesda, USA, to Sydney, Australia. She plans to return to work just as soon as she can stop blogging and finish updating that darn resume.

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