Sylvia's Journal

Today started off bleak with me pitying myself, to tears, about my professional re-entry. I wrote to a colleague for advice – how to handle the stalemate, the not getting enough work to stay afloat. Support came from an unexpected corner – help to reframe and re-center – but none of it will help me in the short run I fear.

I did participate in a teleconference of the US team that supports the Afghanistan team and there was finally a tiny sense of belonging again. Afterwards I talked with my supervisor and I asked for more advocacy, more action and told him I felt totally abandoned by the organization I had served for 25 years. Silence.

I did some work on the proposal that is still far out into the future. By now I have nearly exhausted what can be done so far ahead. The two weeks of vacation I had reserved for my trip to Holland are kicking in on Monday.

It has been drizzling all day, miserable weather that makes the yard with its dead leaves look dirty and unkempt. The indoor plants appear to like it, enjoying their last few days outside, a last fling before hibernation.

In the evening we joined friends in Newburyport to see Woody Allen’s wonderful Midnight in Paris movie. On our way there I was acutely aware of our freedom, to do whatever we want without having to check with security, asking for a car and driver and drive along deserted streets with too many people with guns, go through checkpoints upon entering building and hoping that all would be quiet. The glass of wine afterwards was also a luxury I did not take for granted.

In the final equation being home does carry the day in spite of the new stresses at work.

We are sitting by the fire. I have just finished the Quaker sampler – done in reds and pinks and purples – for Sita and Jim’s first anniversary while Axel is trying to read our home insurance policy.

reading an insurance policy turns out to be a great remedy against sleeplessness. The whole document is about things that will not be covered (a friend who worked in the insurance industry told us that you have to pay attention to the exclusions rather than what is being covered. You will find most of the document covering exclusions.

Some of them are most bizarre. I can just see these lawyers sitting around a conference table cooking up scenarios that most of us wouldn’t even dream of.

Axel does this reading because he is handling all the insurance stuff and so estate management remains a fulltime job for him while I go to work and continue my so far fruitless search for work.

There is no magic bullet, my new boss tells me. Of course I never asked for a magic bullet, just some recognition that I have been at this company for 25 years next month, wondering, is this the best they can do?

I came home really flat, Axel could tell from my face, after an eight hour workday of which six are being charged to vacation time – ughhh.

I now regret that I did not seek more actively a job elsewhere before I returned as now its is a little late in the game. I will start to pick up that search again because the current situation does not look good. Axel is ready for me to ship out again if that is the only way to be fully employed and being together. This is going a little different than I had expected.

We have two cars again – it took a lot of time and much money to get the second car, the one that will give Axel his freedom to move around. And then it immediately broke, that is a pin in the gearbox snapped and so Axel had it towed to a garage. But it is fixed now and hope for the best. We did not buy the car our dealer had available even though it seemed in better shape: it was 2 years younger, 20.000 miles further along but also nearly 3000 dollars more. You get what you pay is the motto of course. We knew this.

I keep going to work as if I have a fulltime job but I am still mostly running on vacation time. The balance between vacation and work time (that is billable to one budget line or another) is subtly shifting as I get more work. My eight hour today was up to half vacation and half work, a first.

We completed much of the discard phase of our re-settlement into our own house. I brought several bags full of Africana to MSH and was happy to see how most of it has been absorbed into various offices. The IT team has the large mud cloth with a village scene (from Mali) draped over its receptionist’s desk and my colleague Mamadou got the red leather amulet, one of several – appropriate as they are both from Senegal.

Liz has the painting from the Eastern Cape on her wall; a gift from my one-time squash partner who I met through a notice on the hotel message board. Sandra who does gender at MSH has the tiny ceramic Lesotho rondavels and the bronze men from Benin. She already had a relationship with them that is worked into her daily routine. It is nice to see things that were living in boxes out in the open on my colleagues’ shelves and desks and enjoying a second life.

I have finally managed to have vacation – just when I have near exhausted my vacation days and it is time to find billable hours and get up early in the morning again.

Sita and Jim are staying with us for a few days. Axel, Sita and I went to the Topsfield Fair, the oldest agricultural fair in the US, about 173 years old or thereabouts.

Sita mobilized us so we could see the Bengal Tiger show – a little depressing and more than a little degrading to see the king of the Sundurbans lowered to slavishly do tricks for the (mostly) white men with their families. They rolled over, stood on their hind legs, jumped through a hoop and growled – all this in exchange for pieces of steak tip pinned to a long stick and everyone clapped, but for what?

More entertaining were the piggy races with miniature Vietnamese potbelly pigs, adults and adolescents, racing along a tiny racetrack towards an Oreo cookie (for the winner) or crumbs (for the loser). We watched two races with hundreds of people under a warm blue sky.

Then the draught horses and their well-preserved antique delivery carts, moving effortlessly across the tracks in the big arena, competing for prize ribbons.

We had some overpriced greasy food, a must at the fair, sitting amidst obese people who each had their own portion – calories added to calories with some bacon bits to top everything off. Yum.

We saw the flowers and garden club winners, the 4H club exhibits and then stopped at the bee house where I signed Axel up to become a beekeeper sometime early next year.

Back home Sita and Jim embarked on an extravagant cooking adventure that included pumpkins filled with cheese fondue and bread and then baked in the oven. Jim worked on a parallel meal that included marinated chicken and vegetable kebabs. Tessa and some of the kids friends came over to help us eat it all – we did not quite manage so dinner for tomorrow is already cooked.

Just before bedtime Axel took me out for a kayak trip in the cove under a full moon. It was the most peaceful experience I have had in years: the calm water of Lobster Cove and further out Massachusetts Bay, the soft sound of water lapping against the rocks and the sea like a mirror –and all this in October.

Indian summer has started after a few very cold days and nights, including a near frost. Everyone was out in flip-flops, shorts and tank tops and I was happy to follow suit. I ahd asked the girls and their mates to come to help us clear out the attic. We started late and first had to go through the Afghan treasures so we didn’t quite finish the job.

We filled three enormous fisherman’s boxes with paper recyclables such as rejected artwork, books, homework from 9th and 10th grade and miscellaneous artifacts from earlier decades of our family life. The girls made these decisions pretty easily; their father had a harder time.

To compensate for these losses the girls filled their cars with afghan embroidery, Ibrahim’s patchwork sheets, the small stools and tables that are too low for our living room and several books on how to speak Dutch. And then they left stuff with us for safekeeping – something we are trying to avoid but failed at. Now all the empty spaces in our house are filled again with things in transit – a process that seems without ending.

It was lovely to have the girls and Jim around for the day. I get a kick out of watching them having a good time together commenting on each other’s old writing, drawing, stuff that was important a long time ago that now make us laugh. Axel didn’t quite have such a great time because I keep wanting him to throw things out and he can’t.

Axel reminded us to clean the squirrel hair off everything that left the attic. Dog hair in the house, mold in the cellar and squirrel hair in the attic: it is nearly as bad as Kabul.

One of the treasures we found was a wind chime that Axel’s dad brought back from the war. It is a rather naughty wind chime that cleverly combined several male body parts into a bizarre statue that includes a voluptuous woman. We can’t quite hang it outside our home to catch the wind as it would make all our visitors blush. I suggested we bring it to the Antique Road Show when it gets to our neck of the woods – it certainly would create a stir. Some clever statue maker in Italy must have sold a few to the troops stationed there and made a killing.

And then there was Axel’s early artwork, letters from his 8th grade students when he was ill several decades ago, pictures and personal messages from way long ago girlfriends – that’s the problem when you can’t throw things away.

We just scratched the surface of what’s in the barn’s attic and one day I hope we can make our way to the end and open boxes that contain treasures we have forgotten about.
We celebrated the successful disposal of a few cubic yards by not cooking and going out for dinner. It was a lovely day and I am so happy to be home.

We are now learning that the mold removal companies are part of a racket – we could have figured this out – it is just like healthcare; as long as insurance companies pay, and not the home owner, who cares about the cost. The insurance adjuster will come and determine whether the sky is the limit or whether we are staying closer to the, moldy, ground.

Summer has returned, and with it the monarch butterflies that are fattening themselves up for their long trip to Brazil – it is hard to imagine these tiny fragile creatures being able to travel that far. They are attracted by the butterfly bush (buddleia) which Tessa planted during our absence. It’s beautiful and the butterflies think so too.

I took advantage of the warm weather to give all the plants that have summered outside a good wash, get rid of dead leaves, remove the bugs, clean the pots and, if needed, cut back the root balls so there is room for water and soil in the pot again. The next challenge is shoe-horning them all into our house near windows. Now, with the gigantic couch in our living room there is little space for large plants. A few plants died since we left for Kabul – this may have been a good thing. Where are we going to put all these plants?

In the evening Tessa joined us and we drove to Portsmouth to celebrate David’s 60th and see his kids, our kids’ friends. David is from the same year I was born in 1951 – a good year. David used to be Axel’s night nurse during the first week after his release from the hospital – on Thursday. We’d sit and talk until it was bedtime and then we had bagels and lox in the morning – a nice ritual. David always came with his little dog She-ra, an animated little creature that terrorized the local chipmunk population. I learned this evening that She-ra is no longer of this world.

In the meantime the chipmunks and squirrels have also recovered from Tessa and Steve’s two dogs and are reclaiming the yard, hiding nuts everywhere, in the ground, in the potted plants and between the sill of the house and its insulation.

The mold people are coming to our house to assess what it will take the recalcitrant growth out of our cellar. With the recent flooding in Beverly and Danvers they are busy these days but ready to take on another customer. Our flooding is a little older and the mold is everywhere, making Axel wheeze and breathe with difficulty.

The prescription is a bit of a bitter pill: anything that is cardboard or paper has to go – go as in: into a dumpster. This includes the Dutch and American games that have been sitting in dampness (“oh no”, said Sita), coats that are too far gone, old Gourmet magazines and cookbooks that we stupidly had stored in the basement.

Once the insurance adjuster has come we won’t have much time to make the hard decisions. But a Buddhist would say that this is all good luck as it is about time that we rid ourselves of all our earthly clutter. There is some appeal in this I must admit. I look forward to the dumpster.

I had a little bit more work today but my timesheet is still mostly filled with vacation hours – a little troubling as I think I must near the bottom of the vacation time barrel.

In the evening we drove to Cambridge to have dinner with Pia but instead we found Omid knocking on the door of a dark house. Pia had been called away to an emergency situation and so we settled in at the bar of the Elephant Walk, a lovely Cambodia-French fusion restaurant near her house until our table was ready. Pia joined us before the food arrived and we had our evening together after all.

As we drive home the thermometer indicated a slow drop in temperature. Freezing was predicted for most of Massachusetts and so I had picked the last red tomatoes and the purple and green peppers. We moved all the outside vacationing indoor plants near the house and covered them with plastic. Winter has made its first appearance. It will go away for awhile but not for long.

I took my gloves out of their summer hiding place and used the cashmere scarf that Sadiq’s wool ladies had knitted for me as a goodbye present.

Today I went to work. Not that there was a whole lot of work to go to, maybe more of a day of ‘work hunting.’ I went in to talk with people about how I could make myself useful and earn a living. I also went in to collect my access card to the building, find a space to sit, drop off books and Africana no longer needed back home and have lunch with a colleague not really seen/spoken to for a long time. And finally I also dropped my computer off for a thorough checkup which lasted through the day.

Having a space to sit lifted my spirits. I felt adrift before, not having a place to call my own – I can’t imagine what homeless people go through –and I was only missing a work home. I also will soon be part of a team, as we prepare for a proposal, so I don’t feel as much like a retiree. A space and a team is all I need – I was never so aware of the importance of these two things. Oh, and my computer back of course – being unplugged all day is risky as everyone here assumes you are plugged in all the time.

It was Tessa’s Steve’s birthday today and so we drove to Lanesville to join them for his birthday dinner. We ate a sinfully rich lasagna from the plates that Tessa remembers from her childhood, now hers to keep. Just as we are finally feeling settled into our house, they have nearly completed their nesting. Their little dollhouse is snug and lovely with everything carefully put in its place. It’s wonderful to have kids all grown up who prepare meals for you, serve you wine and then do the dishes.

I am losing count of the number of lobsters Axel is catching. Yesterday he came with the biggest catch ever, a two-and-a-half-pounder. After it had been given a hot bath we discovered a whole colony of tiny mussels that had settled on the inside of the giant’s tail – infant mussels. We hope this is a good sign that mussels are coming back. There have been no mussels in the cover for several years now.

Steve came to pick up his stuff, we brought the boxes to the dump and then I cleaned up the barn that has been used as a staging area for too many things. With winter coming Axel is moving indoors and has been spending the entire week to get his inside office organized with shelves and places to put the 100s of records that are occupying every existing horizontal space.

I did a project that took the entire morning and that ended exactly where it had started with us none the wiser. Being home is a lot of work.

We rewarded ourselves after this day of toil with the tail and claw of the giant lobster, a stiff drink and an evening of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves for entertainment. We’ve got to learn to say ‘no’ to projects.

I have three widgets on my desktop. Only one is still really relevant: the one that tells me how many days until we will celebrate my 60th birthday on an island on the far north-eastern tip of Holland. The other two I keep out of a sense of nostalgia: what the exchange rate is for Indian Rupees and what day it is today on the solar calendar (which uses the signs of the zodiac). Today it is the 9th day of mizan (‘scales’ or libra) in Afghanistan, while here we have arrived at the last day of September.

As it was the last day of the US government’s fiscal year it was now or never for some awards we have been waiting for. Some 11 months after we put in our bid MSH was notified today that the Sustainability, Leadership, Management and Governance project, the 6th incarnation of the project I started my MSH career with, was ours.

This is good news for many people at MSH whose job was tied to winning this project. As for me, I am not sure how this will affect me. I am not listed as permanent staff on this proposal and I am not entirely sure what the work will be. But at least I won’t looking for work in an environment that doesn’t have enough to go around for everyone currently on the payroll.

Sita pointed me to Freecycle.org – a localized website that tries to reduce what we put in landfills by providing a (virtual) marketplace for giving and taking without money changing hands. It’s a brilliant idea that I am discovering much too late. I joined just in time to advertise the availability of enormous amounts of packing paper, bubblewrap and Afghan moving boxes – wares that were immediately picked up by three different families who needed exactly that. What a concept!