Sylvia's Journal

We are now into details. Details for the wedding, details of doctors’ appointments, details of gardening and details of how many when where and what. This wedding is very loosely organized and we have no idea how many people will come on what day. The only thing we know for sure is that the bride and her mother and sister have nice dresses and there are rings, there is a cake, a Senegalese band and Lebanese food. The rest feel rather improvised.

I got the silver shoes and other parts of my wedding attire, plus some more. I relish the summer dresses I can wear with arms and legs exposed in the hot late summer sun.

We are now into details such as fireworks and the bridal bouquet. Tessa and I went to get fireworks (of the innocent kind) in New Hampshire and I am going to check on the internet how to make a bridal bouquet. If you can learn from the internet how to make bombs and IEDs I bet you can also learn how to make a bouquet for a bride.

On our way to New Hampshire Tessa and I stopped in Newburyport (for the silver shoes) and lunch with Chuck and Anne in a lovely upmarket sandwich place.

We picked up the last of the summer plants, and the first of the fall plants to pretty up the empty spaces of our late summer yard, at Tendercrop Farms, a lovely ‘back-to-the-land’ kind of place that produces most of what it sells.

For Axel we bought large chunks of beef to be cooked rare – it is something missing in our Kabul diet. When Tessa suggested some nicely marinated chicken I surprised her by saying in a sharp voice, no, no chicken, we are sick of chicken. This needed some explanation: the chicken we eat in Kabul is cooked into dry shreds that stick between your teeth, after having been flown in, frozen, all the way from Brazil.

My sister, husband and their daughter were supposed to have arrived by plane from Brussels and by car from New York yesterday evening but because of late arrival in NYC, decided to spend the night in Connecticut. They are the only ones from the Dutch side of the family. I am very happy they were able to come. It’s a long trip for a wedding.

And while we are busy with the last small details for the wedding, daily emails arrive from ANSO (the organization that tracks ‘security events’ in Afghanistan for us, NGO workers). The run-up to the elections is in full swing now with kidnappings, illegal checkpoints, IEDs and other attacks on people who are trying to get themselves or others elected. They too are into details, but of a different nature, and some are paying with their lives.

I am in a different world now and these events are, quite literally, very far from my bed.