Sylvia's Journal

It’s a beautiful humid summer morning in Manchester; the humidity is of the kind that makes arthritic joints hurt. This is one good thing about living in high and dry Kabul, my right knee is OK there most of the time.

We celebrated Father’s Day with all but Jim in a restaurant that looked out over the Gloucester wetlands – a breathtaking landscape that makes you want to reach for your watercolour kit. Our own watercolour kit has remained unused despite all our best intentions and will travel back with us to Kabul.

The vacation was hardly a time to rest and relax as it was filled with too many obligations, to others and to ourselves. I remember this phenomenon from when we lived in Lebanon, then Senegal. It’s a common problem for expats.

We know that our next ‘vacation’ here won’t be much of one either, what with the wedding and another short stay. The real vacations won’t happen until the end of this year and the spring of next, when we go on our regional R&Rs, regional meaning India or the Emirates, or wherever we want to go further in our central Asia neighbourhood.

Last night we said goodbye to Sita and Jim, after an unsuccessful attempt to meet with all sets of parents to talk about this wedding that is supposed to be low key and simple. We are getting vibes that this may not be the case but it is too late now. We are leaving and this is now in other people’s hands, primarily our daughters, it seems.

After my first swim of the year in Lobster Cove, with thunder clouds and lightning threatening on the horizon, we understood that our boat trip to Gravelly Island was off. Instead we went for a spin around town in Woody’s old model T Ford, a car bought by his mom in the 40s and kept in pristine condition.
Manchester, at this time of the year, and seen this way is even more beautiful than ever. We completed this farewell to our town with G&Ts overlooking the cove and that is when we both got sad.

I tried to remove the sadness with only partial success by walking for an hour at dusk while Axel and Tessa reviewed the financial aid application for her (hopefully) last year in school. She has reached the age at which she is (at least according to the IRS) no longer part of our household.

I had my last acupuncture session with Bill. He had come to the conclusion that way too much of my energy is in my head and so he stuck several needles in there to let some of the excess energy out and also to connect me with the chi of my ancestors. I told him that I wasn’t sure that would be very helpful since my ancestors along the female line were also very much in their heads. Still, it was another great session that was accompanied by the music of Ali Farka Toure. I emerged from the session in a better psychological state than going in and now feel quite ready to face the long trip home and the return to work.

How to keep a balance between vacation and managing one’s affairs is more than a challenge this ‘vacation.’ Managing our affairs includes a wedding in less than 3 months, and, more urgently, our return trip to Kabul. There is a computer crisis at the Afghan embassy in Washington and, this may not be unconnected, no one answers the phone anymore. The problem is that they have our passports. This is a source of stress.

Weddings are notorious sources of stress, even when it is meant to be a low key one. Luckily Tessa is on top of things and we got a few of the wedding to do list organized: a clambake/Essex River boat ride for the immediate family and two tickets to Barcelona for a well deserved R&R for the newlyweds.

Roger called us in the morning, in between toot and shoulder doctor appointments, that there was a moral imperative to go out on his boat, so beautiful was the weather, finally. We joined him only after the teeth were looked at (OK for me, not OK for Axel, requiring another appointment, yuch), the shoulder was checked (as good as it can be and will probably ever be) and an appointment with the virus doctor from MSH to stop the flow of 100s of error messages that seem to be able to slip through my (clearly defective) anti-virus software. After several checks they still slip through and won’t be fixed until I am back in Kabul.

But then we had a bout of vacation – in breakneck speed up the small zigzaggy creeks through the Ipswich wetlands, upstream only to be able to float silently back downstream. We went hunting for edible grasses (Glaswort (sp?) and something else that looked that the ancestral wheat that got us into farming and eventually into modernity).

When going out into Ipswich and Essex wetlands timing is everything. If you miscalculate you need to stay in the marshes until the outgoing tide comes in again to lift your boat. This happened last fall to Axel and our friends when they pulled up their anchor too late. It was nice in hindsight, but not great when you have other appointments in your book.

We returned to dry land in time and had another lovely dinner with our best friends in Essex, collectively cooking a wonderful meal in the big St. John’s kitchen. The marsh greens we had collected earlier made it into an asparagus dish (the lemony one) and a green bean dish (the salty grains), enhancing both dishes.

Back home the stresses of the immediate future pressed forward again, as if they had lain in wait to catch us upon our return. It included packing for my trip to Albuquerque, monitoring the cost of all possible routes for Axel’s return trip (but no purchase because of the missing passports).

When morning came around I was able to squeeze in another Acupuncture session with Bill. He aligned my kidney-heart axis, a powerful one for people who have to be on (that would indeed be me as I have a conference presentation tomorrow that I have given little attention so far); he also doctored with my temperature using needles which left me cold and then hot. And finally he paid special attention to my arthritic knee that has been bothering me in the middle of the night. It was a long whole body experience that left me calm first and then tense again when I realized we had to rush to the airport to get me on the plan to New Mexico. I am half way there now.

Axel has his hearing back, at least with his hearing aid on. It was something mechanical in the fancy hearing aid (too fancy for dusty Kabul no doubt) and it is fixed now; he was sent home with a spare of whatever was broken.

These are the days of tune-ups and checkups for our bodies. They need this. Yesterday I had a vertigo attack again, a mild one but still. I took the pill they gave me at the George Washington Hospital emergency room and was drowsy most of the rest of the day. It’s still the same diagnosis, mild positional vertigo. Today teeth and shoulder doctors are on the menu as well as prescription refills.

We had bad Mexican food for lunch which was amply compensated for by a superb Malaysian dinner at Sook and Roger’s house with our closest friends.

The rest of the day was too much about arranging our return trip to Kabul and back in August, and taxes, how to limit the potentially enormous tax bite out of our earnings while in Kabul. It is all very complicated but our tax advisor thinks we are on the right track.

And in the meantime it is wet and cold most of the time. I am starting to look forward to my trip to Albuquerque tomorrow. There the temperature is more like Kabul’s, in the 90s. I have the right clothes for that; better than that as I don’t have to cover myself from head to toe in cloth. Sook had gone to Saudi Arabia and demonstrated her head to toe outfit which, we decided, made her look like a Chinese nun. At least in Kabul I don’t quite have to wrap myself up like that.

With the rain clouds gone, today is the first day that I am hearing and seeing the small planes from the Beverly Flight School overhead. I had some hope I would be flying but that is beginning to be rather unlikely with the days to departure dwindling rapidly. Flying will simply have to remain on hold for now.

Early morning we took off for western Massachusetts to see the couple-to-be and their new house in Easthampton. The town is the poor, vinyl-siding-clad, cousin of Northampton, the town of students, frou-frou shops, and over-priced houses. Sita and Jim did well to land in Easthampton in their (yes, vinyl-sided) house with its large piece of land and more rooms than a starter home is supposed to have.

The house is kludged together like our first house was in West Newbury; nothing that sweat and the right tools (and yes, some money) cannot fix over the next 10 years. The rooms already have their signature Sita paint coats: bright pink in the dining room, aqua in the kitchen, a yellowish green where the stairs are, lavender in the bathroom.

The cats Mooshi and Cortez have the run of the furniture – it’s all theirs to chew and scratch; as a result all the chairs that should be comfortable are too sorry to sit on, with their stuffing hanging out and a thick layer of cat hair covering the seat and what’s left of the armrests.

We recognized various items formerly from our house, furniture, lamps (no problem) and vinyl records (we are paying attention).

After we made a tour of the estate we had brunch in Northampton and then disappeared into a delicious bookstore of the kind we miss in Kabul (and Manchester for that matter). We all came out with piles of books that would make a Kindle jealous.

We discussed the wedding and then got lost in the much more exciting honeymoon plans, pouring over maps of Spain, the selected destination. Sita downloaded Spanish language flashcards that would help them ask for directions (if spoken slow enough).

And then it was time to drive back home and start dealing again with all the things that need to be done before we leave again. We had been able to hold these at bay until then. So it was a very good day.

Letting go and easy breathing needed some help yesterday – it is as if my mind is still in Afghanistan and my body was not getting the right signals. So I eased into bodywork with a pedicure, accompanied by Tessa at the Vietnamese nail place in Beverly. It was nice but not enough.

We then stepped things up with an acupuncture tune-up, highly recommended by Tessa. What convinced us to go there was that Tessa’s Steve had subjected himself to the treatment and was happy with the results. For him to have any body work done that isn’t surgical or dictated by a (real) doctor, is rather extraordinary. It was probably the best recommendation we could get.

And so we presented ourselves at 3 PM to Bill who looks like he just graduated from college. He worked on us in two adjacent rooms, sticking what felt like a thousand needles everywhere.

That he knows his stuff was clear right away. Without knowing us he read our bodies like an open book. That too was comforting. He ended both our treatments with something that looked and felt like scraping our skins (my back, Axel’s arm that was damaged in the accident) with a Chinese soup spoon. I thought he was scraping my skin off. It was rather painful but felt wonderful afterwards.

Now, more than 12 hours later, Axel’s arm looks like he was in an accident again but his fingers feel better than ever, without the tingling and tightness in his arm. My back is all blotchy red; it looks like I have been severely beaten. I wouldn’t dare to show it in public. But I too feel that much of the tension I carry there has been scraped away. We felt so good afterwards that we made another appointment.

Back home we plucked asparagus out of our garden and cooked the traditional Dutch/Belgian asparagus meal with ham (yeah!) and eggs and new potatoes, drenched in much butter.

This morning I explored what is available on iTunes university related to learning Persian (a lot) and lectures from Ivy League universities (a lot). One can even listen to all the major commencement addresses. I downloaded the entire Betty Crocker cookbook, including coupons, on my i-Touch, all that for free. What a wonderful world we live in!

Our passports are now sitting in some part of the Fedex system on their way to Washington, for their Afghan visa stamp. We were not able to get our visas renewed in Afghanistan because of a Byzantine bureaucratic process, a misalignment between the various agencies involved in the stamping process, or because we are not paying under the table as we are expected to do. Or all of the above.

We are trying to balance our time here between ‘have-to’s’ and fun. We took care of some of the ‘have-to’s’ yesterday (haircut, tax stuff, visa applications, appointments) and the rest was for fun. The latter included a walk into town, a breakfast at the Beach Street cafe consisting of home fries and lots of bacon, and then a drive to Newburyport for a reunion with Anne and Chuck, a salad lunch and a glass of rose.

On the way back we assembled our dinner: fresh fish, local strawberries, local asparagus (including some of the remaining stalks from our garden), fresh corn from further south, fresh pasta and wine. I marvelled at the taken-for-granted luxury here to simply walk into a store and buy wine and beer, drink it, and come back for more as often as your wallet allows.

People outside the US may not understand that fun does not include being glued to the TV to watch the World Cup matches. Although a bigger deal than 4 years ago, from observing our surroundings it does not seem to be something that stops everything and everybody in its tracks.

Today fun will include a pedicure for me, more walking and sitting in the garden to read. It is vacation time after all. Afghanistan seems far away, even though this morning, reading Dexter Filkins in the NYT, brought it momentarily, and uncomfortably back on our screen.