Sylvia's Journal

It is mustard time. Before we left for Afghanistan I would spent many evening nights before Christmas making mustard. I would produce over a 100 small jars. A real cottage industry. I would lugs boxes of mustard jars to MSH and put them in the pidgeon holes of colleagues dear to me or who had been particularly helpful over the year.

This year I won’t make so much. Only a few will go to my workplace and the rest for family and friends. Maybe that is the most telltale sign about how marginal I feel in my work life. I have been back for over 3 months but nothing much has become any clearer in terms of full time employment. Paradoxically, I am not without work, but all of it is in faraway places that require at least a day of travel time.

Axel already knows his Christmas gifts. In fact one was already delivered and enjoyed: the trip to Holland. The other is also a trip. He will accompany me to Japan at the end of January. This is one benefit of travelling so much – I can take him along on frequent flyer miles.

Axel’s other big Christmas gift is, we hope, a clean cellar. The company he selected sent a team of mesoamericanos to spray and vacuum our cellar and remove the offending mold. I had expected a drawn out affair, over days. But when I came home one day it was all done and a huge container was parked at the end of our driveway. It was half full with stuff that was either too moldy to clean or should have been thrown out a long time ago.

Upon closer inspection, after the team had left, we discovered so many nooks and crannies that still had their cobwebs intact that we asked the boss to come back next week. We would pay the 5000 dollars the insurance company gave us for a job well done, as per specs, but this was hardly worth a fifth of that amount.

yesterday I joined four of my MSH sisters, colleagues of more than 15 years, for lunch at a restaurant in Jamaica Plain where we had celebrated so many things over the last 20 years. It was a trip down memory lane without too much reminiscing and much joyful news about grandchildren in the near future and meaningful work. Three of the five have left the organization, only two of us remain.

In the evening Tessa had invited us to a party organized by her friend James in his bachelor pad in Gloucester. Coming from a generation who generally considered adults ‘the enemy,’ it was good to know that in Tessa’s circles they are not.

We were the only representatives from the parent generation. I was wondering whether any of her crowd could even imagine bringing their parents to a party where everything they did was observed. But Tessa did not mind. Maybe it is considered cool to have parents who survived a plane crash and then went to live in Afghanistan. For Axel such parties with young people are a real treat as he moves effortless between generations.