Sylvia's Journal

Our first day home was a workday for me. I worked from home by telephone and was able to be mildly productive. I took a nap in the afternoon and went to bed early. On Thursday I went in to work for a series of meetings that kept me occupied for a good part of the day but by 3 I started to fade, my eyes red. Still, I didn’t drive home until 5 after I had had a chance to say hello to our various country representatives who were in our office for a week of strategizing and connecting. They were in meetings all day long so I had to park myself ioutside their meeting room to get a chance to say just a quick hello.

Sita, Jim and Faro joined us at dinnertime where Axel showed off his cooking skills with a delicious Pad Thai. But always, when Axel cooks, we eat very late. I don’t know how I was able to stay awake till ten when the meal was finally cooked.

During our absence one of our plants died, the passion flower that is a bit of a Lazarus plant, having died a few times before but always coming back. It is an old plant that we rescued from Axel’s father’s greenhouse and has some sentimental value. We keep our fingers crossed that it will come back again this time.

In the meantime, Sita taught us that the leaves and the twigs are medicinal. She boiled the twigs and crumpled the dried up leaves. It helps with sleep, she told us, and isn’t addictive. Last night I made a cup of passion flower tea and fell asleep instantly, sleeping for four hours without interruption.

Since I fell and hurt my shoulder on November 30 I have not had a full night sleep as the shoulder is particularly painful at night. I often wake up every hour or two hours. So the passion flower-induced sleep is an improvement.

I was cleared by my family doctor for my shoulder surgery and have another clearance procedure next Friday at the hospital, and then it is countdown. I never thought I would look forward to surgery but now I do. I would like to get back to a good night sleep and be done with this constant low grade pain in my shoulder.

It seems every year there is some surgery  that is necessary so I can function as a whole person (again). The ankle, securely fused, now allows me to walk without pain on flat surfaces.  Frozen unpaved surfaces remain a challenge, but I am learning to adjust to that reality which is a whole lot better than what happened to others recently.

After a nice Thanksgiving dinner at Sita’s in laws I slipped on a small patch of ice – my luck – and learned today from the shoulder doctor, supported  by pretty graphic MRI pictures that even I understood, that I managed to tear two tendons, the supra and infra spinatus, which are supposed to keep my (left) shoulder in place, entirely off the bone. Although I had already started on a regimen of physical therapy and anti-inflammatory pills, they cannot repair this, only the surgeon can.  Of the eight tendons that keep my two shoulders in place, one is retracted beyond repair (from the plane crash), one was pulled up and is anchored in the bone, and now these two.  Ughhh.

So I am looking at surgery again. I know the drill now – 6 weeks in a sling, and PT for months.

The year started sadly, only days after all the good wishes and happy thoughts, always for a better year than the last. But the reality is that every new year carries sadness and suffering alongside happiness and joy. A young Dutch/Indian couple, rejoicing in the arrival of their first baby later this year, which they announced on Christmas day to the grandparents, friends of mine in Holland, is no longer a couple. The young woman died on the second day of the new year as the pregnancy turned out to be ectopic and, I assume, medical aid came too late, in far away Bangalore. I am familiar with the statistics of maternal death in India (190 deaths for every 100.000 live births) but when it is someone you know, who happens to be the same age as your own daughter, it is terribly upsetting.

We headed to Easthampton on New Year’s Eve, allowing us to get our Faro-fix and also celebrate the arrival of the New Year with some of our daughter and son-in-law’s closest friends. We made raviolis from scratch sitting around the kitchen table, taking turns at hand cranking the pasta maker, placing dollops of various fillings on the thin bands of dough and stamping the raviolis, square and round. A salad and scallops cooked to perfection rounded out the last meal of 2014.

I had a hard time keeping my eyes open past 10 PM, my usual bedtime. Axel closed his eyes and fell asleep and we woke him up minutes before midnight – as my parents used to do when I was little.

I remember being carried down and placed on the black-tiled window sill, cold to my feet, pressing my nose to the cold glass and watching the fireworks being lighted by the older kids in our street.  Most of the grown-ups would be out, greeting neighbors and standing, arms crossed to stay warm, teeth chattering, exchanging wishes and watching the do-it-yourself fireworks.

Inside it was warm and there was food and warm wine, sometimes champagne and always enormous quantities of runny French cheese and baguettes. I wasn’t interested in the cheese and wine; instead I would go for the leftover chocolates. But the biggest thrill would be to be tolerated among the merry grown-ups. Some years later we would all stay up and play card games until midnight and then go out onto the street and wish our neighbors happy New Year. That is still what happens in Holland: the midnight hour is a signal for a neighborhood to go out and share good wishes; here in the US, if you choose to stay home, New Year’s Eve is a private rather than a community event.

On New Year ’s Day we visited Sita Co.Lab in Easthampton, a large loft in an old mill building, where Sita started her 3^rd business,  a place for young entrepreneurs to work side by side or together, turning ideas into something that produces an income, in an environment that is all about creativity. She’s done a great job in furnishing the place, creating a shared vision, a pricing policy and private, semi-private and common spaces; some are being rented, some not yet. It’s risky business, as all new ventures are, but she’s committed to make it work. Now, for their first time, she and Jim have a real office and we have a place to park our unused furniture, our rugs and old copies of Wired Magazine. Now she needs more toys and things that will stimulate the creative urges of its tenants.

We spent the afternoon assembling IKEA furniture, something I love to do, probably because it is simply a variant on my favorite pastime, the puzzle.

Christmas has come and gone. The dread turned into inspiration. First (even before the 25th) I hung all the christmas light we have that still work, everywhere: around the plants, the windows, the curtains – a tangle of wires. On the outside we also look more Christmassy than ever. I figured I would rise in stature as a homemaker in Tessa’s eyes. The lights were also for Faro of course. When I turned everything on he was mesmerized though I am not sure he even saw the outside lights that Axel tangled with.

As every year I had warned everyone about buying things they couldn’t afford and/or we didn’t need and especially those gifts that would produce more clutter in our already cluttered households (it’s a gene  we both passed on).  I think this year the message took. We gave each other either home-made gifts or clutter-free experiences (like restaurant gift certificates two nights at an inn, swimming lessons), though the teepee that Tessa made for Faro does take up valuable real estate in the Bliss’ already full house.  My present to Steve and Tessa were 6 enormous curtain panels that will keep them a little warmer in their drafty house. It took most of the Christmas week to sew them and line them and hem them, sitting in my temporary workshop set up in the basement. Tessa kept me company while she was making the teepee.

On Christmas Eve we celebrated with one part of Jim’s family, dinner and the traditional Yankee swap, though this time we returned home with several of our own presents. This included a box with the ingredients for Jamaican coffee (coffee, rum and 4 cans of whipping cream). We taught Faro one of my favorite things: spraying the whipped creamed right into one’s mouth. “”More..,more..,” he said in great delight. Now we have another whipped cream junkie in the house.

I had tried to give up on the Chisterklaas ritual of starting our adaptation of Sinterklaas avond late on Christmas Eve and instead do it the next morning – given that we have a toddler in the house who wakes up at 7 AM. But we fell back into old habits and started close to midnight with the preceding hours a frantic burst of activity for most: everyone was busy either writing poems, creating surprises, hiding them all over the house, or finishing projects (like the teepee) – it was, as always, rather stressful, so stressful that I kept walking around muttering ‘this is no fun’ and ‘let’s bag the whole thing.’ Tessa was in tears in the basement working frantically on the teepee with a sewing machine that didn’t cooperate. Only Axel was unaffected; he took a nap and accepted the reality that he was not ready and would not be uuntil the 27th.

And so, despite wanting to orchestrate this otherwise, we couldn’t help ourselves and had our Christerklaas that included IOUs from Tessa and Axel who had not even started their poems.  Our poems hang in the Christmas tree, a novel spin on an old ritual. Jim’s poems are of the literary type, with adapted passages from Keats or Shakespeare or the cleverly composed ‘histories of whatever the present it.’ Sita and my poems have real rhyme and Axel and Tessa’s, well we don’t know yet.

And now the house is nearly quiet with the Blisses departed for Easthampton to pay some attention to their cats since they had been a bit forgotten in the frantic Christmas prep and left to fend for themselves in Easthampton.  Steve arrived very early this morning returning from a long road trip to his family near Toronto. He has had his own franticnness up there and our post-Christmas celebration will be a bit subdued in comparison but welcomed no doubt. We will read the last poems this morning…and be done with Christmas for another year.

I have this tendency to dread Christmas because of all the hoopla about it and then, poof, suddenly it is there and I am not prepared, being so busy with the dreading.  That was one reason why I have not been writing. The other is that my fall on the ice after Thanksgiving is turning out to have some more serious consequences (another dread), requiring an MRI and physical therapy and many anti-inflammation pills, daily. I am rather handicapped in activities of daily living, which includes putting on a coat, pulling up and zippering my pants and drying myself after a shower.

And finally, my long stretch of not traveling has been shortened due to the insertion of a trip to Rwanda before I head out to Ethiopia.  It required a lot of re-scheduling and juggling doctors’ and PT appointments with the requirements of having a full time job. The Christmas vacation, short as it is, comes as a welcome rest stop – now that I think everything is back under, at least the illusion of, control.

One week into my 64^th year I am settling in to a long routine, uninterrupted by travel. As it stands now my first trip is to Ethiopia at the end of January which I will precede or end with another overnight in Holland, this time at my oldest brother’s new home. Some of us are entering new stages in our lives; moving towards 64 doesn’t seem to be much of a new stage – I am not retiring and not moving.

The Ebola swat and swot teams are taking a considerable amount of my time. I am learning why Uganda, Nigeria, Mali and Senegal have been successful and avoided the many wrong turns that Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia took. 18500 contacts were traced in Nigeria – a lot, but apparently still doable – and the progress of the disease was halted. After years of investing in health systems in those countries it was good to find out that something worked.  It is also good to focus on what has worked as opposed to the finger pointing and blaming that gets picked up by the media.

I am back home from a ‘weather horibilis’ ride in, and then 10 hours later back home, from work. It has been raining cats and dogs, accompanied by heavy winds and icing early in the morning. It is the kind of stressful drive that makes one understand snowbirds retiring in the southern states. What makes it worse is that the otherwise soothing classical music that increases my tolerance for traffic challenges, is interrupted constantly by requests for donations to the member-supported station while the news is, if not distressing, then at least boring and repetitive if one’s commute is longer than one hour.

When I finally emerged out of the car, exhausted and stiff, I requested a stiff drink which Axel, my chief cook, bottlewasher and mixologist promptly produced: a sake martini which I am now sipping as I come back to myself and watch him prepare part 2 of the evening, a roasted garlic chicken with vegetables and fettucini. I am so blessed.

On Wednesday, while I was turning 63, my niece had a baby starting its first year on this planet. Between my brother’s family and mine, we have a bunch of birthdays bunched together, all sagitarii.

That was my first present, which was followed by Axel waking up at 5 AM, quite a feat, and preparing me breakfast with our ritual, but never the same, breakfast table decorations.

Although I was in the office, I used the first two hours off as vacation to attend to the birthday greetings and wishes from wide and far, with some surprising messages from people I have not seen or heard from in a long time, shuffling between Skype and Facebook. In the olden days it was postcards, I remember the excitement as a kid.

My next present was the news that one of my colleagues with whom I work a lot will move into a shared cubicle with me as another leaves to join another part of MSH.

I drove back through a drizzle, then heavy rain – it’s rarely nice weather on my birthday – to find Axel cooking my birthday dinner, a Peruvian fish stew with mussels cultivated in Chili, packed in Thailand and bought in the US. On the back of the package was a recipe for ‘gebakken mosselen’ (baked mussels) from Holland. We certainly live in an interdependent world!

The presents kept on coming. Axel had bought me Novak’s The Book Without Pictures which I look forward to read to/with Faro. Novak is the creator of the American Office and knows how to make people, big and small, laugh.

And then we watched another Poirot episode, I made another batch of Christmas mustard and the birthday was over. I have started my 64th year which I initiated by listening to ‘When I’ am Sixty Four’ on my morning ride into work.

On Friday night and then Saturday we joined first one set and then another of Sita’s in-laws for dinner, for variations on Thanksgiving. It snowed again and then froze which produced a nasty fall and a bruised arm. I made an appointment with the shoulder doctor to make sure I did not tear yet another rotator cuff tendon.

On Saturday night, after Thanksgiving, Tessa and Steve got their electricity back. And thus, on Sunday morning early, with the uncooked turkey in the back, we returned to New Hampshire for a second try at Thanksgiving.

Sita, Jim and Faro were not able to join, so it was a somewhat incomplete Thanksgiving, but still with lots of thanks to go around.

While everything was bubbling and cooking we played one round of ‘The Settlers of Catan,’ our favorite family game with basic and extension sets at Sita’s and Tessa’s home, so whenever we are together we can play, the old fashioned way of sitting around a board game.

After our copious meal (made for 6 but consumed by 4) we left with lots of leftovers in containers.