Sylvia's Journal

“My frontier woman!” exclaimed Axel when he came down this morning and saw me stoking a good fire while a snowstorm was raging outside. I had a squirrel pie in the oven, trapped it myself! Actually I don’t like squirrels and prefer pumpkin pie; but what else can you do with such abundance?

This morning is admin morning and so Axel is in charge. Admin is his job in our household. It is not much of a frontier job; rather tedious. There is the refinancing, the upcoming taxes and insurance stuff. Life is so very complicated. The days of squirrel trapping are long gone.

I am happy to announce that I finally won from my sister on WordFeud, in Spanish no less. We are returning to an English board for our next game. Playing in a language you don’t know is rather time consuming. Half of the words I laid out were guesses. Even the Spanish-English dictionary didn’t know them but the WordFeud app accepted the word.

Although I enjoy the intercontinental scrabble games, smartphones have complicated our lives and driven up our phone budget. I called T-Mobile this morning and got a nice lady on the phone to explain to me whether I can play WordFeud when in Japan without incurring enormous charges. We try to understand how the charges work. I am sure that is part of T-Mobile’s strategy: complicate things for the customer so they give up trying to understand and blissfully ignorant rake up enormous charges doing stupid things like playing scrabble on line.

We have to be so informed and conscious of things all the time. It’s a job all by itself to untangle the webs our wallets get caught in.

Sita is heading East, to her annual Davos Summit stomping ground. I asked her if she looked pregnant – yes, she said, it’s pretty obvious now. This may be her last trip for a while. I am glad she is travelling in style, business class. All pregnant women should.

Axel and I will fly in the other direction on Sunday, not in style, to Japan for a whirlwind trip that includes teaching two half day classes and two full day classes in between our arrival on Tuesday and our departure on Monday.

Axel is supposed to go touristing even though he said he would come watch me teach – how sweet but how silly. I will put him on the Jacob de Zoet trail in Nagasaki and on a paper trail in Tokyo. I am sure he will amuse himself. We are particularly looking forward to many culinary adventures.

Last night our friend Woody came over with his dog who was like a lost soul, walking frantically to and fro looking for her buddy of 13 years. But her buddy, riddled with cancer, was no longer of this world. Woody described the holistic veterinary practice where she spent her last hour – it made me all teary although I have never had to go through such an experience. There were candles, music and rescue remedy for the dog (I remember this was administered to us after the plane crash) before the final injection.

All of us were very sad. Her very distraught buddy left us with a small puddle on the hallway rug. We forgave her and put the rug in the shower.

This morning there was snow on the ground – not much but enough to cause traffic complications. Knowing that my last meeting of the day would end at 5 PM I happily skipped the early morning rise and left for work after the morning rush instead of before. It is nice not to have to get up and leave in the dark (or worse: snow and dark) – but of course it meant coming home in the dark. It’s going to be dark on one side of the day or the other.

I spent my day completing my Kenya assignment, working on a corporate assignment and some small stuff in between. Adding work up to 8 hours was, once again, a challenge. My departure for Japan next week is a relief and a reprieve from this headache.

Yesterday, a holiday, Axel and I went to the Peabody and Essex Museum in Salem. It was partially a preparation for our trip to Nagasaki next week. We were there to take another look at the artifacts that related to the Dutch trade with Japan, now that we have both read the 1000 autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a sad tale about cultural miscommunications, pride and greed.

The paintings of Decima island in Nagasaki Bay look so much cleaner than life must have been (and was described in the book) in the late 1700s, as do most other paintings of the trading posts in India, China and Indonesia at that time: idealized images of what the westerners wanted these places to look like.

We admired the porcelain ware, much of it commissioned by the Dutch, and the intricate craftsmanship of the Chinese and Japanese artisans who made furniture and household goods for the European and American markets.

We also visited the Shapeshifting exhibit of Native American artistry, old and modern. Its piece de resistance, at least for us, was the thirty or so foot whale hanging from the ceiling made entirely from white plastic chairs.

And all through this, in the background, I play scrabble with my sister in Belgium; she on her iPad and me on my smartphone. She has beaten me royally several times already on an English board, a French board and now we are playing on a Spanish board – a language neither one of us speaks. We are putting down words of which we don’t know the meaning. Playing in a language you don’t know is a lot of work and I am not sure I like it. Next we’ll try Dutch, still a formidable challenge for me.

It was exactly two years ago that Axel introduced his students at SOLA to the power of a vision and the importance of being able to write with power. He did that by comparing Martin Luther King’s speech with that of Karzai’s. The latter was a sorry speech, with no power and no vision. Two years later we can’t even be disappointed – the speech had already predicted that nothing great would come from him.

That was also a period where Axel returned to his teaching roots and realized that teaching is his calling. I had known this all along but the wishes of others sometimes obscure our calling. Luckily it is never too late to respond to the call once we hear it. Axel is researching where to register to get a certificate in teaching English as a second language.

Yesterday I biked to Quaker meeting in bitter cold weather under sunny skies. It’s hard work to bike in the cold but I wouldn’t give it up except for a snow storm. We sat in mostly silence which was even more work than biking. I keep telling myself that I have to take a meditation class, and a yoga class, and this, and that, but nothing comes of it. I have my travels as an excuse but they are not. I feel a bit in limbo.

Ted came by to introduce us to S from Afghanistan. Another remarkable young woman who is studying for her MPH and needs connections I have. She needs an internship to get more hands on experience in maternal and child health, preferably in Kabul before she completes her course work. So that will be the task for today, a holiday to celebrate MLK’s work and words.

I had just started on a rather girly looking sweater for a new born when word (and jpeg) reached us that it is a boy that is in the making, a baby boy Bliss. And so I unraveled the second sweater in as many days.

Sita and Jim will have a baby boy on May 28 if everything goes according to plan. This little boy is lucky to have three sets of eager grandparents awaiting him, a teeny cousin, Nora, a wonderful set of aunties and uncles in close proximity and then of course the best parents he could wish for. Yesterday there were many exclamations all around Massachusetts: “It’s a boy!”

And so we are settling in for the seemingly long wait of four more months. I am trying to arrange my travel schedule so that late May/early June is stay-at-home time. That may turn out to be a big challenge.

Today I am starting an intense period of travel with a trip to Kenya. In the next three months I will be visiting 8 countries, all in Africa except Japan later this month. It temporarily solves my billing problem, finding enough billing codes to fill 8 hour days.

When on a mission like this I have the luxury of having a code for the entire period plus some spillover for after I am back. And then of course I won’t have to get up at 4:30 to get quickly to Cambridge, ahead of thousands of fellow commuters (although some people would think that is still better than commuting by plane to Africa).

I unraveled the sweater I had nearly completed, only one and a half sleeve left. I decided I didn’t like the product and was probably never going to wear it. This is as incomprehensible to Axel as folding up the 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle and putting it back in the box. But the pleasure of these activities is in the making, not the product itself.

Yesterday we went to see 102 year old uncle Charles who still lives by himself in a trailer park in back of a shopping center. It doesn’t sound very good but he is happy there and has a good support system, and he can walk to McDonalds for a cup of coffee if no one brings one to him.

His trailer is sparsely but sufficiently furnished. There is no clutter. There is just enough of everything for him and for a guest if one were to show up. We returned with the bag of Christmas gifts (a jar of mustard, a bar of chocolate and some tangerines) because such a bag is clutter and not needed. We can re-use it, he could not.

We drove to each of Wareham’s beaches and sat in the car looking at the afternoon sun and the changing colors of impending dusk while Charles was telling us stories – me knitting on the back seat (the knitting undone today).

The Wareham and Onset beaches are stunningly beautiful. We ended our tour with tea and coffee at Dunkin Donuts (we should have gone to McD) and a chocolate donut for Charles. He doesn’t have to worry about gaining weight or cholesterol.

On the way in we drove via New Bedford. We had a plan to go to the Whaling Museum but we left the house too late. All we had time for was lunch. On the way back, too late to come home and prepare dinner, we stopped at Ikea and had a very inexpensive dinner before dragging ourselves through the entire upstairs showroom looking for an elusive cabinet that Axel had set his eyes on.

The last time we were there was a few months after our accident and the image of dragging ourselves on our injured limbs stayed. Once again my limbs are painful and once again I felt unable to complete the circuit, much to Axel’s dismay. I told him he can go as often as he wants by himself when I am travelling – there will be many opportunities in the next few months.

The news from Afghanistan continues to be dismal. On the heels of orphan abuses, reported in the NYT, and today’s deadly explosions in Kandahar came the Sahar Gul story reported by Jon Boone in the Guardian UK. The wicked mother and sister in law have been arrested. It is an archetypal story worthy of the Grimm brothers – though I am not sure there will be a Cinderella ending to this one. And I know that for this and other similar headline grabbing stories countless untold ones remain in dark basements.

The unraveling of the sweater felt a little cathartic.

We welcomed the New Year with a bagpipe serenade. Our friend Steven plays many instruments. He brought two to our house, the sitar and his bagpipe.

The sitar he played indoors, the bagpipe was pulled out at midnight to play Auld Lang Syne. Standing under a crystal clear sky he sent the bagpipe’s haunting tones across Lobster Cove from where they bounced back to where we were standing. A dog barked next door and then fireworks (of the teenage boy variety) started someplace else. We rushed inside as it was very cold.

That was the end of a lovely evening with our musician friends from down the street – wine made by a Manchesterite in Italy, fish soup, Dutch apple pie. Around these delicacies we wove stories about cross cultural music, Quakers and Buddhists and the persistence of religious images that we bring with us from our childhood.

I finished another puzzle, obsessively I might say. There is no one to help, Axel is clueless about puzzles, and the puzzle doesn’t progress unless I do it. It is done now and I can put it back in the box for later, when I retire.

My other new year’s holiday project is the knitting of a sweater from the wool Sita gave me for Christmas. I had to go to the yarn shop for some technical assistance which the knitting guru gladly provided. All the while I am playing scrabble with my sister and niece over the phone. I am doing quite poorly.

I am also doing poorly with my joints and tendons which all seem to be permanently inflamed – this takes some of the fun out of our daily walks with Tessa and her dogs.

I have never quite enjoyed official holidays as I do now because they are days that I don’t have to cobble together 8 hours of work. I didn’t realize that the day after Christmas was an official holiday (Christmas being on Sunday) until this morning when I saw it listed as official MSH holiday on my Outlook calendar. Yeah!

The day after Christmas was devoted to clean up, both of Christmas paraphernalia, creating space again in our already crowded living room, and throwing more things out in the big dumpster that will leave us shortly. This included the red fake leather chair Axel’s father used to sit (and sleep) on in their TV room and on which countless squirrel mothers had given birth. We had decided that it was too gross to consider for re-upholstery. There is a matching white fake leather chair (Axel’s mom’s) and it may go the same way as it also shows remnants of squirrel afterbirths.

Included in the big throw-away was my moldy Halloween collection, built up over my 25 years at MSH and mostly for the purpose of Halloween displays that a colleague and I used to put up at work at some ungodly hour in the morning. This year I realized that that phase is over now and things could be thrown out. It included masks, rubber body parts, wigs and more. I saved only a few things that may come in handy one day and that can be washed (like the Ronald Reagan mask).

After the cleaning we went for a very long and intense hike in the Manchester-Essex Conservation Trust area, a gem of a semi-wilderness area that we have only once visited in our many years here. Trails are marked and so we did not pay much attention to the map. If it wasn’t for the pink blazes marking the trail we might have gotten hopelessly lost. We did end up a little different from where we had expected to return so we sent Jim jogging to bring the car and pick us up.

Lately I have found walking on uneven ground difficult and very hard on my ankle. It is not the ankle that was injured in the accident but I am beginning to suspect it may have been injured after all, an injury that wasn’t detected. Such intense hikes up and down hills and across tree roots and boulders is becoming increasingly painful but I am not quite ready to acknowledge that this phase (of being active outdoors) is over as well. We are still holding on to our cross-country skis, just in case we can.

After a Dutch dinner of ‘boerenkool met worst’ (kale, potatoes and smoked sausage) we went caroling with a neighboring family that consists entirely of artists, a very uplifting experience. While the men were admiring silk-painted ties and tasting a home brew the women played music and sang carols, changing the masculine pronouns in all the songs into feminine ones; no one noticed. I slipped out early as it was a school night, but with the promise of more artistic fun on New Year’s Eve.

This Christmas is a little different from last year’s which we celebrated in Kabul. It’s an odd experience when this special week is just an ordinary week, as it is in Kabul, where the big holiday (Eid) took place some time ago and the new year doesn’t start until Mach 21.

Being with our kids and friends is wonderful. With the serenity (oh how I love the music) that has taken the place of its franticness, time may stand still.

The day before Christmas Eve we went caroling at D’s house, an annual event we look forward to as Christmas caroling is a sure way to lift one’s spirits. And God knows we needed spirit lifting – D because her husband passed away this month and me because of my difficulty to get my feet back on the ground. And I am sure there were other sad stories among the carolers. But while we sung the missing husbands showed up in spirit and the future looked brighter again.

Christmas Eve was a time of cooking and rhyming, in preparation for our Christerklaas. In the late afternoon we joined Sita’s in-laws across town for an annual ritual that includes great company, great food and much cooing around two babies. Next year there will be three. Sita and Jim practiced holding a baby as if there was no tomorrow. They are next, five months hence.

The in-law event is also an annual ritual and includes a Yankee Swap (or Dirty Christmas as they call it below the Mason Dixon line I was told). People pull numbers from a hat and everyone put their unlabeled but wrapped gift in the middle of the room. Number one gets to pick a gift first, then number two, etc. Any number after 1 can choose to exchange the gift selected for one that someone has already gotten. Finally number 1 gets to do the final exchange, if any.

It’s great fun as one is confronted with the quickly formed attachments we develop to material things – but holding on to a few prize gifts is near impossible. The gifts that were most exchanged were coffee paraphernalia, a knife set and a ball of horse dung.

I drew the last number which is considered very lucky. I got a bottle of wine and exchanged it for the ball of dried horse manure plus some lottery tickets. It was the horse manure that will make this a gift that will keep on giving – actually really a gift for our flowerbed after having bloomed for me all summer. (The lottery tickets were losers).

Back home we all dashed into our rooms and offices to prepare for our surprise-lade Christerklaas, a variation that is beginning to develop its own character, on the traditional Dutch speaking-truth-to-each-other rhyming and teasing.

The Lobster Cove variation consist of elaborate schemes with riddles, multiple beneficiaries and collective projects, but also of hanging poems in the tree. In another decade the origins of this ritual will have been lost in the mists of time.

We usually start at midnight because no one is ready before that time. This time, since we are all a bit older, we weren’t able to finish things and by 2 AM we gave up, to be continued.

So far I have made out like a bandit and received some great poems and gifts: a composter (goes with the horse manure thing), a new pair of Dutcg clogs (the old one got eaten by Tessa’s dog while we were in Kabul), wool, a shawl and a bunch of bath liquids that include one by the name of heavenly bliss, that includes red poppy and hemp extract – will the police come and arrest me while I bathe in this naughty concoction?

One of the themes this year appears to be pigs and goats. There was a bacon cookbook, goat cheese, more bacon and a gift of a goat and a pig to be distributed according to Heifer International’s wishes. And then the other theme of course is baby-in-the-making Bliss.