Sylvia's Journal

Tessa had been preparing for weeks for her first official function at her new house: Thanksgiving for her parents, sister and brother-in-law and nephew. It was meant to be a spectacular event with guests arriving the day before and a plan for outings the day after.

On Wednesday we drove to Pembroke (NH) in a snowstorm that left the North Shore with a dusting but covered New Hampshire with a whopping 10 inches if not more of heavy wet snow that crushed trees and dropped limbs on power lines. At 3 PM the electricity flickered and at 4 it was out. The outage affected hundreds of thousands of NH families which would have to do without their turkeys, unless they had gas-powered barbecues and a sheltered outdoor space to operate it. These same families also had to do without the traditional watching of games on TV. In addition, phone, computer and iPad batteries would be worn out before Thanksgiving Day. People would have to talk to one another without the crutches of electronic entertainment.

At Tessa’s house no electricity also means no water as it is pumped out of a well. So here we were 6 adults and one toddler, no electricity, no water (meaning also no flushing of toilets). Luckily the wood fired stove kept us warm and toasty and allowed for melting of snow to provide us with drinking water. The stove surface was large enough and hot enough, to cook bacon and eggs, but not a turkey or any of the other trimmings so carefully selected and prepared by Tessa. It was a huge disappointment.

We ventured out into the snowy landscape which was beautiful and very photogenic; but lacking skies and good outdoor gear, plus a hyperactive toddler who wanted to be carried by his exhausted parents, the escape from the house was a short one. Back inside we acknowledged that this would not be the Thanksgiving we had planned and considered an earlier return to our home, with its water and electricity. Less than twenty-four hours after the disappearance of electricity we gave up and returned home with the large uncooked turkey, ending our Thanksgiving, leaving a very disappointed hostess behind. It was heartbreaking.

Tessa and Steve choose to stay and ride out the power outage – hoping (though knowing the odds) – that the electricity would come back soon. So far it hasn’t and they are beginning to wonder about showers and the content of their freezer. Luckily they are young, have heat, water in 10 gallon containers and a supply of Dutch cheese and licorice. It reminded us how much we take water, heat and electricity for granted and how much these utilities determine our comfort. Nevertheless, the short time we had together, the 7 of us, left us most thankful for each other, our girls, their mates and our most delightful grandson.

Today, exactly 28 years ago that I joined MSH, the week of Thanksgiving, my first three days of work. At that time I had no idea what career I wanted and was happy to simply have a job. Tessa was just over a year old and Sita had just turned 6. Axel was full time employed and traveled a lot, much like I do now. It was a challenge and my diary is full of pages describing how I managed: sometimes good and sometimes only with a lot of tears and anxiety.

When I look at my own daughters, even though one only has dogs rather than children, I am happy to notice that they are doing better than I did. And I believe I managed a little better than my mom did. This must be evolution.

In my week of work I greeted and then said goodbye to my boss who traveled for the next month, leaving me the supervision of two senior consultants and the very vague task of making sure they fulfilled the terms of their contract. I ended up sitting at their feet and extracting as much learning from them as I could. The seeds for my career were planted right there and then.

This month, the 21^st to be precise, also marked the one year anniversary of my ankle fusion. The bones are fully fused, have been for some time now. I have learned to live with the consequences: no more inflammation causing unbearable pain when simply walking short distances. But all this at some cost: stiffness which, when I forget to do my morning exercises, has me hobbling (painless but hobbling nevertheless) when I leave my bed. Uneven terrain remains problematic, such as the woods in back of Tessa’s house or our lawn descending to the beach. But on asphalt or hard surfaces I do fine and no one can tell.

Fall and summer keep playing musical chairs – one day cold and blustery and then t-shirt weather. Axel is busy with estate management which keeps trumping his professional ambitions. Often I find him at the end of the day rather grumpy and exhausted.  He needs a housewife and handyman. I try to be the first whenever I am home and the handyman we hire sometimes. And so squeak along until winter is here and there is nothing more to do outside.

I have started to dismantle a chair that I found by the side of the road decades ago. I learned about upholstery on this chair in a class at a vocational school night program in the late eighties – about the same time Axel build his dory in the same school. Tessa’s dogs had taken possession of the chair years ago and abused it to the point that the insides of the chair started to come out and the springs went in every which way. We made a trade: Tessa and Steve got our 3-person couch and love seat – which had always been a bit too big for our small living room and we got the old chair back.

Every night last week I dismantled the chair a bit more – I even got the springs out, untied them, cleaned them, got all the nails out and now the chair sits there – just a frame, waiting for its renewal. I have an upholstery book by my side and tons of supplies in boxes in my office. I have never redone springs so this will be an adventure. It is also a dry run for the re-upholstering of my mom’s little couch on which she spent the last years of her life. That one also will need to be stripped to its base frame. But first things first.

Last night we had a colleague from Afghanistan over. He and I worked together for 2 years and I saw him in that time move from program manager to chief of party, a very talented man. He is here for 2 weeks and got to experience Halloween. Picture him next to a female colleague in a devil’s costume, red tutu, horns and a tail – it was too funny.

He gave me a better insight of Afghanistan under the new president and told some stories that gave me much hope that things may turn around. People voted to avoid the fate of Iraq which was too painful to consider. A return to warlords would surely lead there. They picked a man of great intellect and integrity, a statesman rather than a warlord. We hope he can withstand the pressure from people who stand to lose a lot with the transparency he is after.

I returned home without a fever, re-assuring my entourage that I had not brought Ebola to Massachusetts. Nevertheless not everyone wanted to hug me or shake my hands so I continued to elbow a bit here and there.

Back in the office I learned that some of my colleagues are in Liberia and doing good work to make sure that sick people who don’t have Ebola, or pregnant women can use the health facilities. I can imagine no one wants to go to a clinic or hospital when these have become depositories of dying Ebola patients. In the panic around Ebola we tend to forget that more people need help for other ailments and more are dying now, probably, of these illnesses because they can’t access that care. I was wondering whether I would have agreed to go there and I am not sure. I am proud of my brave colleagues.

It had been raining for several days but nothing would have told me it was a big storm that had passed over us if it wasn’t for the cove. It is a roiling and boiling cauldron with layers of foam on top of the angry sea. The tide was so high that our beach cooking area was overrun and the kayaks from our friends and our Adirondeck chair nearly swept into the ocean.

We have the dogs over for the weekend, a sleepover at oma and opa. They are easy guests, just requiring two meals a day and a place to sleep. For the rest of the time they entertain themselves catching chipmunks and squirrels. They don’t really catch them because these critters are too fast but this keeps the dogs busy and running. Tessa and Steve are interrupting their move into their new home for a wedding in faraway Pennsylvania. They are in that age group now that marries and has babies.

I have been home for a week and a new departure looms, tomorrow. I have been trying to get my health back and only partially succeeded. We now know that it is the cavities of my sinuses that are the culprit for my coughing and low energy. One antibiotic was replaced by another which, hopefully will get at these hard to reach places.  I am going once again with a mask and armed, this time, with various medicines. I will be surrounded by doctors this time but hope I won’t need them.

In the meantime four extraordinary Japanese women, who competed, and won, a fellowship from the Fish Family Foundation as part of the Japanese Women Fellowship Initiative, showed up at MSH and I got to spend a day and a half with them at the beginning of the week. We sat around a table and talked about leading and managing, about women and leading, about financial management and fundraising in American NGOs, conflict management and more. It was such a treat for all of us. I was rewarded with a nice closing ceremony and moving speeches at Simmons College this morning, followed by a French Bistro lunch that will keep me full till tomorrow.

I had not driven into Boston since our office moved out of Cambridge. I had forgotten how bad the traffic  is when you don’t drive in at 5:30 AM. Luckily I am listening to a good book on tape which I can now listen to through the car audio via Bluetooth.

On Sunday Axel took me up to see Tessa’s and Steve’s new home in  New Hampshire, the day before their move in. It is one hour and a half from our house, a nice drive through endless woods where the trees are turning yellow and orange.

The house is an odd assortment of rough-hewn structures that look kludged together from the outside but inside it is nice and cozy with a beautiful large eat-in kitchen, large rooms on several levels and bathrooms at each. The kitchen and living room have a large deck that looks out over their own pond and some of their 7.5 acres of wood. There are outbuildings for animals (chicken, horses, goats)  for wood, for making an office. You’d think you were far away from the city but in fact they are just outside Concord NH and an enormous shopping mall on the way.

Their parting from their sleaze bag landlord was right in style with him threatening the movers with arrest, calling the cops and blocking the moving van. Tessa said that this made it very easy to leave Dorchester and move north.

She is moving to territory where dreadlocks, especially copper colored and knee length dreadlocks turn heads. Some smile, the hippies are back, and some, she told us, you see them wonder.

Axel had worked hard with the painting and getting the place ready, especially for Tessa who has to make a running start as her business takes no pause.  This is a good thing of course. Steve took a week off, also a good thing.

He still has to commute to Boston but hopes to find something closer by as the commute from Concord to Boston, even when not during rush hour, is a punishing one.

Axel married one of Tessa’s friends who was also Sita’s Doula, with the boat maker who fixed his dory. It was a beautiful day on Conomo Point inn Essex. The bride and groom must have known this since there was no tent and the entire affair was conducted in the open air: the ceremony, the dinner on long tables in the garden, the speeches and then more partying into the beautiful Indian summer night.

Faro and I had to be taken to bed around 8 PM, he because it was his bedtime and I because of my jetlag. After that the young people return to the party and continued the celebrations.

We decided that Axel makes for a good reverend. He did a wonderful job that got all of us weepy. He received a ‘solemnization certificate’ issued by the governor of Massachusetts himself which allowed him to ‘solemnize’ one marriage on that one day. He discovered that you can get ordained over the internet in some internet religion and then you can make it a habit, marrying people. It’s that easy here. He could then call himself Reverend Axel. I kinda like that.

Sita has been preparing Faro to identify Antananarivo as a city that is in Madagascar. This is how I am greeted each time I come home: “Oma, how was [Ulan Bataar, Kinshasa, Ouagadougou, Antananarivo]] followed by our question, “where is [Ulan Bataar, Kinshasa, Ouagadougou and now Antananarivo]?” followed by his answers: “Mongolia, Congo, Burkina, Madagascar.”  The neural pathways connecting one name with another seem firmly established in his growing brain – of course we have no idea what thoughts accompany these connections other than with his oma showing up again on Facetime or in real life.

This time, after arriving at Logan we went to the doctor’s office rather than the hospital. I suppose this can be considered progress. I am being checked for whooping cough and received another basketful of medicines to put an end to my persistent cough and sinus problems. I am on the mend but not out of the woods.

My nurse practitioner carried a face mask, so did I. She told me to continue wearing the mask on all future flights, no matter how uncomfortable the mask is. It’s better than getting sick, no?

My next trip is just around the corner, on Saturday with Air France again. Since my respiratory problems only seem to happen when I fly AF I am beginning to wonder whether it is because they don’t clean their air filters often enough. And so I am dreading this flight. I will be masked.

I am still in the wake of vacation, despite a one day interruption, a workday on September 2. It’s great to get off the grid but one has to realize that getting back on, as one must, is hard.  I had forgotten about lots of things, including checking my (snail) mailbox which is no longer en route to anything in the new building. A package that has to go to Madagascar was waiting for me but I missed it, and who knows what else.

My travel season starts soon, starting with a trip to Washington DC on Sunday, just when the summer here is giving us one 10+ day after another, followed by a trip to Madagascar that will see me through the end of the month.

On Wednesday my niece and her family arrived for a two month journey to the east and west coast. They started here and now it seems they may not want to leave. From a small 4^th floor apartment in Amsterdam to Lobster Cove, they think they’ve gone to heaven.  We spent the entire first day of their journey in and around the water. The weather helped and the water was swimmable as we call it (it is never warm).

We had some assignments: pulling up lobster pots that have been in the water and without bait for 3 weeks. The first one had a surprise: one enormous lobster, unfortunately female and with eggs, so we had to send her back. The others, one pounders, had been at each other (or maybe it was the impressive lobster mama) and an enormous severed claw was lying at the bottom of the trap. We had lobster salad for lunch. After that we focused on crabs, resulting in pounds of green crabs, an invasive pest, turned into crab bisque.

Our Dutch guest, a water engineer, decided he could make a better trap which he did and we tested. It is a prototype that needs some work, but our guests left and we are left with the prototype. We have had more crabs than we can use, other than adding to the compost pile, so the prototype will probably remain with us as crab trap 1.0.