Sylvia's Journal

We were welcomed back at our own home with hugs as if we were old friends. This was not a surprise. When you live for two weeks in someone else’s home you learn a lot about their personalities. We learned first of all what they looked like from the many family photos on the walls. We also saw what books they are reading (we like some of the same authors), the games they play as a family, the kids’ toys and books, the garden (we enjoyed their raspberries while they enjoyed ours before Scottish and American birds got them), the spices they cook with, the wines they drink. Everything in one’s home is imbued with what one values. And once you discover that you have some of those values in common, there is an unavoidable attraction. 

We also communicated a lot over the last two weeks on WhatsApp about such mundane things as garbage disposal, the demise of the little apple tree, where do we find the toaster, etc. All these things together created a bond one could not possibly expect if the exchange had been a commercial transaction.

The guidelines from Home Exchange suggested we unclutter (a good suggestion) and remove very personal items. We found that it is these very personal items (unless fragile, of immense value and/or irreplaceable) that are important in an exchange, and set the stage for a friendship to bloom – something we have never experienced using VRBO, AirBNB or other vacation rentals. This is the brilliance of the home exchange idea – you actually create new friendships across oceans and lands. 

We were in invited to dinner in our own home – it was at first a strange sensation, to be served by people you have never met in your own kitchen and seeing them move with ease, knowing exactly where to find what. They had gotten as much at home in our kitchen as we had been in theirs.  

We were served tea and cake, (there had been a birthday), followed by a swim. Then it was the cocktail hour. We had champagne, and toasted to our new friendship. The boys watched movies in the living room while we exchanged stories about our adventures over dinner preparations. We discovered that Axel had snapped a picture that included the kids’ grandma who is part of a rowing boat crew we watched while having our pint on the Portobello Promenade. It was great being a guest at home.

The dinner was exquisite: a crab bisque made from crabs caught by the boys, washed down with a crisp and cool white wine, followed by eggplant parmigiana and a desert consisting of raspberry crème, toasted oats and fresh raspberries, plucked from our raspberry bushes that are in full production.  

The champagne, the wine, the food and the five extra hours of the time zone change made it hard to keep my eyes open. I retired to our office where we had set up temporary quarters until our friends move to their next exchange in Newport today.

This was our second exchange. There is one more when we leave for Maine, a family from Canada. It was a good idea, this signing our house up for Home Exchange a year ago. It was a lot of work to get to the first exchange but now we are in the period of its sweet rewards. By the time we get back from Maine we will have accumulated enough points (the currency of Home Exchange) for about 22 days in houses anywhere in the world that Delta’s frequent flier miles can carry us.

This is Tessa’s week. She turned 28 yesterday which we celebrated with the family – Faro was being watched by two of his many grandparents at our house, allowing Sita and Jim to join us. A friend had flown in all the way from LA for the occasion and for her first taste of the East Coast. After unpacking a bag of presents, mostly kitchen and cocktail making stuff, we walked to a local restaurant and had a feast of a dinner at 224 Boston Street. Tessa had reserved us seats on the patio surrounded by trumpet vines and other lush summer greenery.

The lobster traps went in yesterday, with the help of friends. It is now one year after Axel’s rotator cuff operation and we realize that hauling in lobster traps may not be advised quite yet. The same friends who put the traps in will come back on Thursday to hail them up – we keep our fingers crossed for an abundant harvest. They would be the first lobsters of the year. We have a grocery back up plan, just in case the lobsters were grazing elsewhere.

Faro is with us the whole week but so far I haven’t seen much of him. On Monday we drove into town for a potluck to say goodbye to a dear friend and longtime colleague who is moving west. We overlapped for more than a year in Afghanistan which makes for many good stories. Yesterday I left before anyone woke up and came home long after Faro’s (and my) bedtime and today I left again at daybreak. I hope we can play tonight and have some hours together. It is the first time I see him walking. The joy on his face, when he realizes that he can now reach more kitchen drawers with interesting stuff in them, is priceless.

He is learning about ‘No, you can’t have that!’ and things being taken away. His forehead wrinkles into a V and he doesn’t like it. It is still charming and quite cute to watch him express these new emotions but I know it won’t be charming for long. Luckily, he is mostly smiles.

He is having his first sea experience. Sita took him into the water, wearing his tiny crocs. He now has a life preserver as well so he can go into the boat. No swimming quite yet, but the beach is endlessly fascinating with lots of stuff to explore, still mostly with his mouth. Sita is learning to be a mom on the beach. It is a lot of work, the sun screen, the watchful eye – but seeing him explore this new world makes it all worth it; I can’t wait to be part of that. And then there is the small town 4th of July parade and the fireworks, he has no idea what’s coming.

Labor Day came and went, in a blur. In fact I can’t remember what we did except sleeping in (everyone but me), seeing Sita and Jim off to their newly married life with a car full of stuff that took a full day of loading and off-loading.

Axel got started on his all clear liquid diet which lasted more than 24 hours until this afternoon. It is hard to imagine Axel without real food for such a long time but he managed. It shows once again how endlessly adaptable we humans are.

Tessa plunged back into school and I got to do a ‘back-to-school’ shopping for old time’s sake. Dinner was a stand-up at the counter affair, effective but not much fun. I had everything Axel couldn’t have: sausages, garden salad and tiramisu. Axel had Gatorade laced with laxative.

We made the rounds to friends who had put up family and friends, gracious acts rewarded with Afghan handicrafts. After that it was time to load up my re-set iPod-Touch with all sorts of apps that come in handy when you are stuck at airports or inside places with electricity.

I unwittingly downloaded several gigs of Tessa’s very high resolution (3 to 5 megs) pictures. I got to relive the various wedding parties over and over again as my computer froze repeatedly from the overload. I had to resize all hundreds of them by hand. I think I will finally succumb to buy a digital photo frame to simplify the showing of pictures to my friends and colleagues back in Kabul.

Tessa took me to the airport in spite of the 10 hours of homework she has between now and tomorrow’s first class (something she mumbled louder and louder as we watched the return traffic built up). The things we do for our loved ones!

On the way to the airport Tessa received a call from Jim’s mom who is a nurse in the endoscopy suite that Axel had successfully completed the ‘procedure’ and was in the recovery bay. I hope we can talk before the doors of the plane close. We all hope he will get a clean bill of health and can join me on Friday for the flight to Dubai.

Last night we completed the final act of the wedding play that lasted a week. Sita’s now official in-laws, a double pair of parents, took us out to a lovely seafood restaurant in Gloucester; there were a few more toasts and Axel finally read from Khalil Gibran book of love poems that we had all see him buy when we were in Beirut in March.

Today the newlyweds will head home with their car full of the decorations, wedding clothes, and, especially, boxes of gifts, and envelopes with checks and cash to replenish the shrunken bank account.

I am looking towards my departure (tomorrow), assembling and packing the stuff that was stacked in boxes when we arrived a week ago. I am also starting to think about how I am going to spend the two days in the quaint B&B a short train ride north of Amsterdam. I have some ideas and, having gotten over the disappointment of not staying there with my honey, I am actually quite looking forward to having time entirely to myself.

You know you are on vacation when you haven’t checked your watch for 24 hours, didn’t check email, facebook, anything and just go with the flow. It has been a wonderful long drawn out party that started with homecoming last Sunday and was finally over when the last friends left this afternoon.

The overflow of friends and family came in with well wishes throughout Saturday to sit in the clear air and the leftover (windy) remnants of Earl, to swim, to kayak, and to sit by the fire on the beach; a fire that has remained lit for over 24 hours. A small group stayed once more for the night, this time staking their tents out in the open and on spots with great views.

The next morning they helped us dissemble the tent, stack the empties, tied the garbage bags, cleaned the dishes, picked up the cigarette butts, throw out the wilted flowers. Everything looks as if nothing happened, except for the flattened grass and the huge stack of wedding gifts and cards with the kind of cash that a newlywed couple needs.

We just finished opening the gifts, the final act of the wedding party. The guests have gone and it is the final goodbye with family, mothers, fathers, siblings at a restaurant in Gloucester. Departures are in front of us now, the honeymoon starts and the vacation is nearly over.

Earl was the uninvited guest at the wedding. We let him rain and blow but this did not put a dent in the formal ceremony nor the subsequent festivities. The bridal couple made their vows in on-and-off rains, standing in front of Lobster Cove with a hurricane lamp and an umbrella on standby. It was a lovely service with poetry and many sweet words about friendship, love and forever, including a small pony dressed in white lace with tiny wedding bells and white roses. Pony was the ring bearer.

Everyone was moved as they vowed everlasting love and admiration for each other. Sita invoked Greek philosophers and playwrights who said something about circles and the complementarities of the male and the female; Jim told all of us how awesome his bride is. We, the two mothers, sat next to each other and gave each other a little squeeze by way of congratulations. It’s a good match, not only the newlyweds but also the families.

We danced on iPod music which had to make up for the missing band that wasn’t missed all that much. It saved the couple some money and we had more room under the tent when the real rains started. We danced and toasted and talked until my feet could no longer carry me and retired, hours before the young folk did.

When I woke up the last rains cleaned the place out and then the edges of the hurricane blew everything dry. Under the two large tents small hiking tents were pitched and people where sleeping everywhere. And now the place is all spruced up again for the first wedding day anniversary.

Instead of worrying about plan B through Z, as hurricane Earl was creeping up to coast in our direction, we enjoyed a good part of the day on the waters of Essex River as if we had no worry in the world. Friends and immediate family piled onto a pontoon boat and cruised along the Essex River until we found the perfect sand flat where we moored. It was dead low tide.

While the boat crew cooked us a clambake, we played, walked and swum on and off ‘our island’ enjoying the pristine beauty of the tidal watershed, the hundreds of cormorants, sandpipers, terns and sea gulls who had already taken possession of the place before we landed.

I learned that the tiny sandpipers, mere toddlers, had flown in from Alaska and where feeding busily for their much longer trip to Argentina. The parents had already gone ahead, entirely trusting that the inner GPS of their offspring will get most of them safely to their winter abode.

After the boat ride some of us girls went to a spa to be prettified. Sita got the bridal treatment, a facial, a manicure and a pedicure. This bodywork was a new experience for her and full of surprises. She underwent it all with courage and a sense of adventure but when it came to painted nails she drew the line. Her husband-to-be would kill her, she convinced us all if she showed up with painted nails. It’s one of his quirks, she admitted lovingly and then all of us women started to talk about the quirks of our men.

Back home we were forced to confront the notion of having more than one plan for the wedding. The Senegalese band had canceled, concerned about their equipment getting wet (we have tents with side flaps, we countered but this had no effect on their decision) or risking the trip up and down the coast to get to us. That was a serious blow to the overall gestalt of the wedding. I offered my iPod full of Senegalese music but it is not the same of course.

Dinner procured at the Gloucester farmers market was served by a cooking crew consisting of friends and in-laws. We ate, rather chaotically, sitting at long tables, lit by hurricane lamps, with the inner group of the wedding party. We went over last minute tasks and identified those most stressed who needed help.

The bride, in the meantime, was given a basic lesson in makeup by her experienced sister in law and under the watchful eye of her sister, both more knowledgeable in the ways of beauty treatments. She selected something that is the equivalent of clear polish for nails.

Later we watched the groom model outfits A, B and C. Tomorrow someone will go on a last minute search to find the matching tie for Central Asia-American arrangement, (a Turkmen chappan from Mazar-e-Sharif with corduroy pants from the US). This would match the dress of his bride and his father-in-law’s Afghan outfit. All of these outfits will be too hot for the kind of weather that Earl is pushing our way. My mother-of-the-bride dress, on the other hand, will not match anything, only my blues eyes and pink toe nails.

The wedding preparations were overshadowed the last two days by medical checkups. During my annual physical the nurse practitioner discovered some hormonal irregularities that needed more diagnostics. We also learned that Axel’s gall bladder needs to be removed. We were both a bit down from the prodding and probing and the addition of more tests that are jeopardizing the two day B&B vacation we had planned in Holland to recover from the wedding.

The bride and groom have moved into the house with all their stuff, boxes of things to decorate the yard and things to wear. They have taken over the organization of the wedding preparations. The garden is all spruced up, one of the tents is up and edged with Christmas lights. The yard is full of cheap Chinese solar lights, hurricane lamps and citronella candles (the ceremony is at the prime mosquito hour). It will be a Wedding Light, in every sense.

It is now Earl we are worried about. Hurricane Earl is creeping up the East coast to arrive here exactly when the couple will exchange their vows. A tent in hurricane season is a little problematic – it could fly away, all 25 large steel poles – a scary thought. Yet at the same time the tent, if staying in place – would protect us against the rain. We don’t really have any good plan B and C, just a memory of Axel’s 60th birthday that was interrupted by a hurricane like squall (we had a great time, we keep telling ourselves). But of course then we didn’t have a band and 70 guests.

I made a practice bridal bouquet, with instructions from the internet and it is holding out well after 24 hours. It consists of large rosehips, lantenna, goldenrod, pink hydrangea, some greens and speckled greens and a lemon geranium leaf (to keep the mosquitoes off the bride and groom). Since there are no bridesmaids the order is small, one set (bouquet and corsage) for the bride and groom and a smaller set for the witnesses (sister and brother).

Because the self-generating medical visits were breaking our spirits, Andrew and KB took us out for a lovely boat ride and swim at the end of the day when the light is at its best in the expansive Essex Estuary. It was the first time we felt in vacation mood.

Today is the boat ride for immediate family and friends along the Essex River culminating with a clambake served on the low tide flats. It’s another day of respite from tests for Axel. After that some of us girls will get our nails done and then the countdown can start.