Sylvia's Journal

We are getting one 10+ day after another, as if Mother Nature wants to apologize for the month of June when it was only summer in name. We are spending time at the beach, hanging out with our new neighbors, playing with Chicha, and reading. Axel attempted water color again but that got interrupted, a common occurrence. There is so much to do that it takes a lot of will power to just sit at the beach and relax.

The moment I step inside my office I am confronted with a jumble of stuff that divides roughly into three piles: ship to Kabul, move back into the living room, leave here but consolidate and pack up. In addition, a constant surge of emails from Kabul is spilling into my mailbox. There is no long weekend there; everyone is at work; the new week started on Sunday morning and Alain has arrived. This produces an additional flurry of activities and even more emails. I am not responding to any and tell myself that this is OK because it is Labor Day weekend.

I went to Quaker meeting by myself, in the car rather than on the bike. I suppose I could have tried biking with one arm but decided it would be too risky. Only 8 people showed up and so it was a rather still meeting. At the end I said goodbye to Gabrielle, one of our eldest members. She is getting increasingly frail and when I embraced her so say goodbye I suspected we both knew it might be the last time we see each other.

Gabrielle is from Germany and sometimes reminds me of my mom. She came to the US during the war when she was a young woman. Once or twice we have talked about that time but she mostly keeps that period of her life to herself. She never speaks in meeting because, as she told me once, if she were to speak she could only do it in German and that would be useless. I could not convince her that no one would mind and that I could then practice my German again, but she has remained still, except when she falls asleep; I gently touch her to bring her back.

Tessa, Steve and two of their friends showed up with all the requirements for a cook out on the beach. We have a pit that Axel dug out earlier next to a large granite uprising out of the sand. Over the years it has seen some big fires and it is cracked all over but it remains a great natural cooking place.

A campfire needs an instrument and so I had practiced my ukulele chords in the afternoon and was ready for some singing but no one joined in. I think it is because I play rather haltingly. I need more practice so I can slide from one chord to the next without changing tempo. Still, I can now play the chords of Oh Susanna, Goodbye Ladies and more; and I can certainly accompany myself. I will perfect it in Kabul with my house mate Steve who loves to sing, traveling there not with a banjo but with a ukulele on my back.

Axel and I switched from the outdoor fire to the indoor fire that we now light every evening and sometimes even in the morning. It’s lovely and heats the downstairs in no time thanks to an ingenuous fan system. We will miss it this coming winter.