Sylvia's Journal

It is Memorial Day weekend. It is a long week with filial duties, among others. The coral-colored geraniums were ready, waiting to be planted on the ancestral graves. Axel trudged through the thick mud – it has been raining the entire week – at the town compost dump to fill two large boxes with topsoil and get rid of a car load full of garden debris.

Armed with a small amount of vodka and two glasses, a spade and the geraniums, we headed for the cemetery where we prettied up the graves of the elder Magnusons and three of their sons, Axel’s dad and his two uncles. We thanked them for having been there, and the great-great and great-grandparents to have made Faro possible, by pouring a small amount of vodka over their graves. Although grampie and granny Magnuson were teetotalers, and would certainly not have approved this ritual, the vodka was an important ingredient of party libations enjoyed by the next generations. Incidentally, I learned, vodka also prolongs the life of cut flowers.

Next stop was a farm at Apple Street in Essex which is the farm part of a fancy farm-to-table restaurant in Boston called l’Espalier. We bought our tomatoes seedlings which are traditionally planted on Memorial Day, the start of our New England summer, as well as a few other things like oriental eggplant, peppers and savory. Some of the restaurant hands had cooked a spectacular lunch which we ate, shivering from the rainy cold, in a farm that had belonged to the Perkins family since 1635. We have, somewhere in our possession, a marriage contract dated around that time, written on sheepskin, of one member of the Perkins family and the price to be paid for the dowry (land and sheep).

With all duties in Manchester done we headed out to western Massachusetts to spend the night at Sita’s from where we staged our next outing, F’s graduation at the Northfield Mount Hermon School. We met up with other members of the SOLA family, including Shabana who gave the commencement address. I had not seen Shabana since I left Kabul, although I have followed her rise to celebrity status on TEDex and then TED talks, in interviews and from SOLA emails. It was a joyful reunion with all of us circling around these two amazing Afghan girls.