Sylvia's Journal

Labor day signifies the end of summer. We already knew it from the shift in the air, crisp at night, no more need for fans or AC, and the days agreeable warm. We still occasionally swim in the cove, when we are not too busy with the management of stuff. This is why getting rid of stuff is so liberating – less management, more time to swim.

Whenever we can we take meals, breakfast, lunch, cocktails, sitting just above the beach. We have created a little eating corner with the bottom of an old bench and two chairs left behind after a party earlier this year, when the summer was just starting (sigh). I both love and hate this time of the year: love because it is Lobster Cove at its best, hate because winter is coming. 

I have put the finishing touches on a weekend in April on the island of Schiermonikoog, way over at the most northern-eastern point of Holland, close to Germany, surrounded by the Waddenzee, loosely translated as the ‘Flats sea,’ a part of the North Sea that empties with the tides. It will be a family fest, a ‘Vriesstock or Vriesenpalooza’ as my nephew calls it. Axel and I will celebrate our 40^thanniversary surrounded by our dear and noisy Vriesendorp siblings, those of their children and grandchildren who are around next April. We will show up with the 8 of us and it will be Faro’s and Saffi’s first trip to Holland.

Among the many things we are carting to Sita this weekend are Dutch books, so that the language barrier will not get in the way of the kids playing together and our son-in-law Jim can say and understand more that the word ‘paprika snippers,’ which he learned on his very first trip decades ago.

Our car could be mistaken for one that takes stuff to their kid’s dorm. But a look inside shows that it is filled to the gills with things that have accumulated after the student experience (mine and Sita’s): desk belonging to her great grandfather on which I studied for my final high school exams in the spring of 1969, books, photos and CDs from Sita’s school and early employment years, blankets from West Africa, an old map of China from the Cabots who left their stuff in the house we live in, to decorate Faro’s room – he will be the only one who can read it.And after that Tessa gets to pick up her stuff and we should finally be relatively free, free enough to empty one side of our office to install a heat pump and we can be warm this winter, and cool next summer. Free at last!

We have a new roof. Roofers bring large dumpsters. After all the roofing detritus was dumped there was plenty of room for more. Our roof expert told us that we had too much stuff in the attic of what is now our combined office. The structure was not built to hold boxes and boxes of school materials and childhood treasures and CDs of our daughters, plus boxes and boxes of old administrative papers, letters and postcards from Axel, his parents and his former loves, clothes for dolls, for babies, for grownups, countless yards of African fabrics, dishes, moth eaten camel and cow hair rugs, saddle bags, mementos, and boxes and boxes of books: French books, African books, Lebanon books, yearbooks, Dutch books, and magazines that we once thought worth keeping.

And so we embarked on an exhausting trip down memory lane, which included countless steps up and down from the attic to the basement and back, aggravating our muscle and tendon problems from which we are now recovering. 

Peter Walsh, whose book, Let It Go, we first borrowed from the library, then bought as we figured it was an important reference manual, guided us on our journey. What is a treasure, what is a toxic memory?  Much as we did some months ago when we threw out all the papers and cuttings and letters related to our plane crash, now we threw out, without second thoughts, dismal papers and photos and magazines about the years we lived in Lebanese which was at war.

I threw out my entire collection of Dutch literature, closing a door on that part of my life. I had put adds on the website for Dutch people in the Boston area but got no response. I knew I was not going to re-red them and knew no one who would want them.

We made piles for the thrift stores in our area, for the Waring School (all the French books), and the higher end (and pickier) resale boutique in our town, the Stock Exchange. The rest piled up in our office to take to our daughters, including my grandfather’s desk on which I prepared for my final school exams in the spring of 1970. Tessa and I had a facetime session going through all her artwork portfolios, a tedious exercise but it thinned things out considerably.

We found a carefully wrapped up and preserved lot of baby clothes, they were Axel’s. I recognized some from pictures preserved in small photo albums, also in those boxes. They are vintage 1940s. There was a story there, a sad story of the siblings that never came, yellow clothes in case the baby was a girl. I carefully washed and ironed them and then hung them in the grandkids room closet. Not that I would want any kid to wear these clothes today but I simply couldn’t throw them out. I did check the vintage baby clothes offerings on Etsy and eBay but noticed there was a glut (though very little from the 40s). I think these clothes are most interesting for textile artists who can turn them into something beautiful. I will ask around to find people who may want to do that.

I offered up to the dumpster a collection of conference briefcases that I had once hoped to attach to a wall in my office as they were all locally handcrafted and some quite beautiful. But the idea was rejected and I had packed them up, for what? So much of what was up in the attic was there because we thought they were treasures but we learned from Peter Walsh that very few items are truly treasures, the others simply labeled as such because we didn’t know what to do with them. Out they went.

When the dumpster retrieval man showed up I asked what happens to all the detritus and discards as I was feeling badly about what we were adding to a landfill. He told me it gets sorted and only stuff that cannot be recycled (sadly: plastics) goes to the landfill. Metal, paper and wood is separated and recycled or burned (hmmm). And there we stood on the now liberated driveaway, looking up at our new roof that we will never have to replace again (our kids will) and then taking in the opened up space in the attic. 

When I was 10 or 12 I used to borrow books from the library about the lives of accomplished women like Marie Curie, Florence Nightingale. I think I inherited a gene from my maternal line that assumed men and women were equal and deserved to be treated equally and could do anything that the other sex could do (men could knit sox and sew clothes and women could be captains, and train conductors). This wasn’t the prevailing opinion in the 1950s in Holland. Only boys played soccer or cricket. Women doctors were rare except in well baby clinics and as teachers of hygiene (which is what my mom did). Most of the mothers of my schoolmates stayed at home, and those who had started university studies stopped them when they got married.  

Mari Popova, in her book ‘Figuring’ tells the stories of several accmplished women who lived in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and whom I had never heard about. All these women, astronomers, artists, mathematicians, inventors also bucked the trend: they were told to get married and focus on children and home.

I am curious about these women who have veered from the path that convention prescribed.  My mom did that, both my grandmothers did that.

To this day I am fascinated by women who dare to run for president of the United States, who take on powerful industry lobbies because of the damage they do, who call out abuses that have gone unchallenged. During my early morning exercise bike rides, I have been listening to Michelle Obama, Melinda Gates, Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren telling their stories and making history (her-story) in the process. 

Two things have struck me in all their stories:  they all got to the place where they made history (her-story) because they found (recovered) their authentic voice, never silenced by convention and/or powerful men. They also are (and may be this is a typical feminine trait) driven to understand other people’s lives – empathy is the word they all use. 

In my various neuroscience classes I am learning that empathy isn’t actually as great as people claim. If I empathize with someone who is not in a good place, my brain chemistry micks the other’s and I risk getting into that not so good place myself. Better is compassion, which is a combination of empathy (understanding the other, standing under the other’s reality) and action (“how can I help you?”).

With the democratic primary campaigning in full flight I am looking for candidates who show compassion with proposals for action, anchored in understanding (empathy if you will) that are actually realistic and realizable.

From often windy and overcast and drizzly Scotland we are back in daily 10+ days: blue skies, no or light breezes and temperatures that the Scots would consider too hot but we feel are just right.

After no exercise (other than walking a lot) for two weeks, I resumed my daily swims in Lobster Cove waters that are as close to warm as it gets. 

Before I go in the water I scan the mouth of Lobster Cove for fins, white fins. Great white sharks (one or many I don’t know) have been spotted nearby. Since we already have had a 45 feet whale in the cove (granted, it was dead), why not a great white shark?

I swim with goggles because I want to know what is going on beneath me, which is why I don’t like dark muddy ponds or the open waters outside the mouth of our cove.

Lobster Cove is fairly clear these days. I can see the green crabs fighting with each other. Fine, let them kill each other, after they have eaten all the baby mussels it serves them right!

I just finished Maria Popova’s opus magnum (Figuring), all 550 pages of it; a book I plucked from Sita’s eclectic collection of books, and have been carting across the Atlantic and back.  

Popova (whose ‘Brainpickings’ I have subscribed to for several years now), has created something best described as a tapestry of words. Using diaries and letters as her main source, she took me into the lives of some extraordinary women who choose paths of great resistance over prescribed social conventions. They were all pulled by an innate force that knew of their talent. What obstacles, what bigotry, what bias they all had to deal with. And I wonder about all the women that were not able to muster all that courage, or weren’t supported by some remarkable and enlightened men (fathers, lovers, publishers, colleagues); how much talent was lost?

One of the last creative geniuses Popova writes about is Rachel Carson. I think a lot about Rachel Carson as I step into the waters of Lobster Cove, and watch, like a voyeur, what’s going on beneath me; the creatures that eat each other, wondering about the white shark that would eat me. Rachel Carson saw with great clarity, all these years ago, that you cannot interfere in ecosystems without expecting consequences: the killing of seals (they open lobster traps) led to their protection, which led to seal overpopulation which attracted sharks, first the smaller ones until word reached the larger ones that there was good food to be had along the Massachusetts coast. So what are we going to do now? I know what I am going to do now: I am going to re-read Carson’s Silent Spring.