The Last Bit

Our Penske truck loomed outside our house, parked illegally on the street by our red front gate.  Its back end gaped open.  I wasn't sure that we'd fill it, and I certainly wasn't sure we'd fill it in time.  We had to move everything that remained out of the house, which was, despite our sale and numerous ruthless clean-outs, still significant.  Then we had to clean--after moving into a series of dirty houses, I was determined to leave the house sparkling.  And we were a day behind schedule.  Our hotels were booked from Chicago to Montana, and there was no going back.

It was hot.  If you live east, close your eyes and remember July.  Got it?  Feel the sweat trickling down your back?

Martin was at the U, anxiously twiddling his thumbs while an IT guy wiped his computer clean, and I had snuck out to eat lunch down-town with friends.  Lunches with friends had become funny things of late.  Back when all looked clear for the next twenty years or so (our kids would go to school together, possibly but not probably fall in love, and we'd grow old in the long Pennsylvania summers), we'd chat easily about the endless details that sharing daily life affords.  But now, with the house in a constant state of upheaval and an impending move in the air, easy chat, though we tried for it, felt like a sailboat perched in denial on a rolling, stormy sea.  On board we were still toasting each other and eating finger food but we knew the storm, and the tossing overboard, and the ending-up-on-different-islands, was imminent.

All the same our lunch was good and we browsed through the Artisan's Shop afterward, just as if there was nothing pressing to do--no empty moving van, no house to empty and clean.

By three o'clock, the moving truck still looked mostly empty.  The reality of staying up most, if not all, of the night, seemed closer and closer when, around four o'clock, our community began trickling in the door in earnest.  Soon the house was full to bursting with people moving furniture, brandishing brooms and huffing down stairs with boxes.  And before you knew it, seven o'clock rolled around and there was only detritus left behind, a few wisps of us in the corners of echoing rooms, empty mantels and cupboards and drawers.

We sat on the floor in the kitchen and popped the cork from some champagne I'd been saving since my birthday, and then we filled plastic cups and stared at each other.  I raised my cup and bungled a toast:  "To the best friends a person could have," I said, and we drank up.  The children I'd known since they were in strollers, one since birth, tore around the empty rooms in the tricycle and little car I'd left out until the last minute.

Martin raised his cup:  "When we first moved here," he began (oh!  An articulate toast!  Bully for him), "Next to the coal mine, when the black dust covered our windowsills, I said, 'We'll give it one or two years, tops, and then we'll be out of here.'  But soon that year turned into a plan to stay for twenty years, and we were happy about it.  We have all of you to thank for that.  Of course now our plans have changed again, but we love you all and thank you for being part of our lives."

At this point I whipped out the tequila and we finished that off--but there wasn't that much left after all--and I began to feel the reality of what was happening sink in just a bit.  That's what happens when you sit down at the end of a day--you can go, go, go, but then when you stop, what's real is still waiting for you.  And what was really waiting for us now was goodbyes.

Sally had asked us to cry just once before we left, and it turns out that wasn't hard at all.  But as grief can so easily slip into sentimentality, let me skip to the next morning, on our way out of town.

Perched high on the seat of that Penske truck, we surveyed the mess the raccoon had left in front of our house.  We'd just watched the garbage collectors take the twelve or so enormous bags of garbage that stretched from one fence post to the next but they had not deigned to scoop up the disgusting trail of raccoon leftovers. 

We never had caught the raccoon--I called him Rocky--who intermittently disturbed our garbage and whom, one day, I'd seen meandering thorough the garden, apparently shooting the breeze with our well-fed groundhog.  We'd generally opted for a "live-and-let-live" philosophy with the considerable wildlife that kept Wazoo buzzing along, and now Rocky Raccoon had enjoyed the last laugh.

By this time, too much crying had rendered a splitting headache, so every time I bent over to pick up another used, chewed bathroom item, my head felt as if it were going to explode.  But finally the front lawn was clean and Martin turned the key and the Penske shuddered to life.  We pulled away from our curb and left town far behind, sped past the sheep grazing on the hill bisected by a new gas pipeline, looped through the densely forested roads up to a ridge, past familiar farms.  Finally the road spat us onto the Interstate and we were well and truly on our way west.

I shared a generous squirt of hand sanitizer with Martin.  We rubbed our palms hard to free ourselves from raccoon and garbage.  "Somehow that seemed appropriate," I reflected.  Our last act in our beloved, imperfect home had been cleaning up biohazard trash from our front yard.  It wasn't a stylish exit, but it was perfect for us, an act of service to the critters who will live on in our garden long after we settled somewhere else far away. 

And we aren't stylish people, either--we live as fully as we can, love people with as much energy as we can muster, and collect in the warmth and comfort grace and love brings to us.  In the end, we were filled with thanksgiving, more than we could express fully to those who deserved it, and who could have asked for more than that?

And so the miles fell behind us and the tight hills of Pennsylvania unwound into plains, and the plains broke into buttes.  Four days and thousands of miles later, a scrabbly desert burst into mountains.  But that's another story.

One big farm house packed to the gills
+ one moving van
+ small house at destination
(X astronomical gas prices)
=one huge moving sale

This was an equation even I, math-challenged as I am, could figure out.  Martin and I gave ourselves one week to fly back to Pennsylvania and (sans kids) unleash a fury of fixing, cleaning, selling, and packing on our big old Dutch Colonial.

When we walked in the doors, our home smelled the same, of herbs and sleep and rich old wood.  The stairs wound up to the second floor as they always had, and at the top, the childrens' beds were made, ready for their travel-weary bodies to slip between the sheets.  But they weren't with us, and Martin and I gazed at our house--everything clean, everything in its place--and thought of the work that lay before us.  We gazed up at our ceilings where the electrician had rewired the house in our absence, and big holes in the plaster gaped back at us.

The very next day we dismantled the childrens' rooms.  Then we plunged onto the rest of the house.  That week felt like a dream, punctuated by sweet breaks with friends, a last dinner at our favorite sushi restaurant and a midnight trip to Walmart to collect packing boxes.  I realized that the west had already made me soft; the massive, dirty trucks that have clogged the county's streets since the gas boom and the poverty that marks the hilly, green county that we grew to love so well shocked me again.  The houses of my friends and our garden, nearing the peak of summer color, spoke of home but didn't quite feel like home.

Early in the week Sally dropped into our house, a mess of cardboard boxes and plaster dust, and before she left she said, "I want to see you people cry just once before you leave."

Of course we'd grieved plenty by this time, but as a veteran mover--I've moved sixteen or more times now--I know you can't pack up a house and cry at the same time.  You have to be able to see the teacup you're wrapping, damn it.  You pack like crazy and then you leave yourself a little space to let the transition sink in before you jump into the next world--a couple hours at the end to say goodbye, goodbye to the house and your friends and all the goodness that has surrounded you like a choir of voices.  But the packing and the moving is hard work and you have to be wiry and go back to your peasant roots and show a little sisu, as my muscular Finnish ancestors would say.

My parents call this in-between space--and so I've come to think of it--"the wood between the worlds."  You Narnia buffs, you know what I'm describing; in The Magician's Nephew, Digory and Polly slip the evil uncle's rings on their fingers and find themselves splashing up through a shallow pond into a forest.  The world--which has a series of ponds, or pools, is comforting in a way--it makes you a bit sleepy and complacent, but there's a feeling of discomfort, too, as if you're not quite anywhere specific, but in a waiting place.  You're neither here or there but somewhere else all together.  Digory and Polly must plunge into another pool to access the next world, full of adventures (frightening or pleasant). 

I have been in dozens of woods between worlds, and the feeling is one of waiting, caught up in suspense between one reality and the next.  It always feels as if I'm dreaming (almost jetlagged) and if I have to wait too long in the wood between, I begin to feel lost and frustrated.  So I take a breath, grope toward the next pool, hold my nose, and plunge in.

In our wood between the worlds, we had to cut all our belongings in half or more.   We'd done much of that already; we'd excised about 2/3 of our books, clothes, toys, and miscellany.  The furniture had to be rooted through, our beloved old pick-up sold, and our house still felt as if it were at capacity.  Ah, sigh.  I began to think it would be a relief if the house burned to the ground.  We'd book a flight back and arrive completely unencumbered.

And that was a pretty good rule of thumb, in the end.  If the house burned down, what would we miss?  The answer was, not much.  We tried to marry that somewhat reckless rule with the check of practicality (don't burn the mattresses; they are too expensive to replace), and then we began pricing the house.  Soon the entire first floor, the porch, and the driveway were jammed with things we no longer wanted.  Too much stuff had become a price to pay for freedom, for the wind at our backs and our feet shaken free of the wretched dust (the untimely, sad end to a job) that still clung to our feet. 

Now we only needed to sell it all, and that I dreaded more than anything, not because I didn't want to see it go, but because selling my own stuff makes me skin-crawlingly uncomfortable.  (Once we listed a couch on Freecycle and when a family came to pick it up, I made the children hide with me under a table so we wouldn't have to face them.  There was nothing wrong with the couch; it was a great giveaway.)  I just have a paralyzing sort of embarrassment about passing on my stuff.  Maybe it was growing up in developing countries.  Maybe I feel guilty about owning things.  Whatever it is, it made me hate the upcoming sale--which was necessary for our resettlement elsewhere--with a vengeance. 

In the end, I made it through by writing a running narrative on a shopping list pad while two hundred people or so tromped through our house.  I'll include the best bits in the next post.  

Thanks for rehashing it with me.  Soon we can all move west.

So, to pick up from yesterday. . .

We began to think about leaving.  How do I begin to describe the mixture of emotions that accompanied our choice to pack up one year early?  Elation, grief, a dogged determination to work hard and quickly, dread, hope. . . .

The worst part was telling our community.  I thought we'd wait for a few days until details began to settle more quickly but I couldn't stand it.  I'm a terrible secret-keeper generally--secrets (unless they're pleasant ones, delicious to hide away until a joyful revealing) crush me like a cider press, work me like gears, until I yield them up.  And so the day after we reached home, Sally came over and I felt as if I would crack in two if I didn't tell her and get it over with. 

You must understand that Sally and I have seen each other every day for the past five or six years.  Beatrix reminds me if I forget ("I want to go to Will's--her best buddy ever--house!") but there's not much chance I could forget a constant source of sanity, irreverent humor, and tender compassion that comes in the form of my friend Sal.  She kept my life in order, reminding me of forms that were due, snack times I promised to provide and would have missed, children I forgot to pick up at preschool, and she told me the truth when it needed telling.  One especially kid and cleaning and monotonous morning I doubled over on her floor in tears: Surely there's more to life than this!  I cried. . .she consoled me and then she sent me downstairs to run on her treadmill, which did me a world of good. 

We were not of the mall-crawl moms.  We did the occasional lap around our local Walmart in the winter when all was dreary and there was no other place to go, but our days subsisted of cups of tea and library trips and watching her son, Will, dress in Bea's pink pjs and Bea dress in Will's cars pjs.  Dressing in each other's pjs was an especially highlight for our kids and they usually got busy doing just that the moment they stepped over the other's threshold.

When I was gone on the west coast during our dear friend, Nancy's passing, Sally sat with Nancy every day, rubbing her back and keeping up a flow of cheer that I wished I had been there to help provide.  I'll never forget how she told me that she was there for both of us, and when I arrived home, too late to say goodbye to Nancy in person, we cried and laughed and ate and then we cleaned Nancy's room together.  We cleaned each other's kitchens, cooked together, huffed up hills, red-faced and cursing, to try to lose a little winter weight.  She drove me on endless interviews through the winding roads of Greene County and I believe I probably owe her about a thousand dollars in gas.  She was my companion through the crazy, bizarre, hilarious, and trying young-children days.  Our families knew each other in the daily sort of way families used to and I have yet to meet more generous, sacrificial people.  We made it together until our children were in preschool, and for that I am grateful.

But I was the luckiest of all women, for I had other dear friends, too, who bound me up day after day and filled my life with the peculiar scents of their personalities and. . .also somewhat irreverent humor (there's a link here--you can't make it through parenthood without somewhat wicked friends).  Tonya is a bad-ass farm girl who butchers her own chickens and smacks rabid possums upside the head with flashlights.  She lives up on a ridge in Greene County and manages a passel of chickens, two cats, two daughters, endless laundry (of course she hangs it all up to dry on a quarter-mile laundry line), a rotating schedule of canning and preserving and freezing, an enormous garden, a part-time P.A. career, and punctual thank-you notes and social events.  She also home-schools and hunts. 

I spent one lovely evening with her up in a tree blind.  I was there to record the experience (the sound of a stream, the autumn colors, the smell of leaves) and she was there to blow the brains out a doe.  That evening, I left her crashing into the dense undergrowth in her orange vest, a rifle under her arm.  I am not joshing you.   Tonya's from good, work-til-you-bleed Mennonite stock and her house and yard is always neat as a pin.  You would think all of this would equal a totally crazed, secretly bitter woman, but it doesn't.  I love spending time with Tonya.  She's ruthlessly honest about herself and her life.  I am about to scream, she will tell me on the phone.  Do you think it's too early for Kahlua?  Needless to say one of my favorite things to do with Tonya (and her dear husband John) is drink and eat late into the evening until I almost feel sick but mostly feel blissful and sated.

Then there's Michelle, a ravishing beauty who, on her first visit to our house, sat down fully clothed on our homemade slip-in-slide and scooted down our hill to the bottom.  When I first met her at a University picnic, a fly-accompanied affair where I usually smile at people until my jaw aches, I felt that instant draw that I will occasionally feel with a potential dear friend.  My mother describes the feeling as souls leaping toward each other.  I dropped off a bouquet of herbs at her house and we--and our families--were wonderful friends from then on.  It was with them that we fixed homemade truck balls to the back of Sally and her husband, Kevin's car, and it was with her that I heard the most revolting stories of her PA experience.  I oft liked to ask her: What is the grossest thing you did today?  I liked affirming my choice never to dabble in any of the medical professions.  She took Sal and me to New York City, showing us how to move with alacrity through the subway and sharing a steaming cup of hot chocolate spiked with cayenne.  The only time she left us in that metropolis was to duck into a disappointingly-well-lit palm reader's to do a little research about how palm reading is done.  Sal and I stood outside, shivering and watching.  Maybe there's more of an art to it generally, but mostly it was a useless counseling session where Michelle was informed she'd be happy for the rest of her life.  And so I hope she will be.

There was Nancy's precious family; her children who I'd promised Nancy I'd love and care for, most specifically, her daughter Catherine, who spent much of her time at our house and had become a fourth daughter to me, bound up in my heart with my love for Nancy and my trust that I had been in the right place at the right time to wrap up Catherine in tenderness.  I couldn't understand why the non-tenure had happened, why we were being moved on from a place that seemed, for all purposes, like a place we were needed.

 And there were more good women and men and children who wove our lives up into a fabulously diverse, wonderful rope of goodness that kept us truly safe.

So that morning I sat with Sally on the porch as our kids ran from inside the house down the stairs and back again with brimming cups of water (they were making a pond or something) and I said, "I have news and I don't know how to tell you."

Her face immediately fell.  "Just tell me," she said.

"We're leaving a year early," I said, and then we both started crying.  "Are you angry with me?"  I asked.

"Of course I'm not," she said, and then we sobbed for a while.

I told Tonya on the phone and she was surprisingly calm, but then she told me later that's what PAs are trained for, and that she'd scrapped her work for the afternoon and sat on her porch, watching the sky.

Michelle looked me straight it the eye.  "Why?"  she asked, and I explained,  and nobody slept well for a while, especially because others we loved received notice, too.  It seemed that with one fell swoop our lovely, beautiful community had been mangled.

But, as I so often told Martin, big powerful people can only take so much away from you.  They can make you move and shake up your world but they can't change what's deeply true about you--and here, buckle up for a Disney moment--they can't take away your love for one another.  Our community poured more generously than ever into our preparations to leave.  From the time our house went on the market, it was under contract in two weeks.  Care for our children (my family in Washington) was already in place, so we made two trips across the US, one with the children and then another--just Martin and me--with our very pared-down possessions in tow.

I have a few favorite memories of leaving.  One is the night that Martin was gone doing a two-week job in Kentucky right before our first house-showing.  Our friends turned up just in time and we worked on our massive yard for hours, cleaning, trimming, mowing, tidying and tying up trash while our children played.  Then when twilight finally began settling in, just before the fireflies began to prick the darkness that collects down at the Black Walnut tree, we all sat in the yard and drank wine together.  Michelle's husband, Noah, said, "This is a beautiful piece of land.  I'd jump at it if I were looking to buy."

"It's like a park," I agreed.  "Maybe we'll stay here forever."  And then I laughed--a good belly laugh, not a thin, bitter laugh--because we weren't staying forever.  Our move had been decided, and for those of us who were staying behind. . .well, nobody stays anywhere forever, do they?

And that's what it is when you really love a group of people.  Grief turns easily to work and work together yields laughter, and joy, too.  And you take that with you wherever you go.

Today, in the shadow of the Olympic Mountains, I peeled and chopped tiny yellow apples, a crop the girls and I had piled into Bea's bike basket days before at our nearby communal orchard.  I added peaches that were so ripe the skin slipped easily under a hot stream of water, and I broke them into a pot with my fingers.  The girls scooped up a pile of windfalls from our own apple tree and I added them, too, still hard and green.  As the sauce simmered and filled the house with a familiar heady scent, I thought of long mornings in Pennsylvania, a bushel of apples between my feet, bent over the peeler as I chatted with Nancy Thompson and we sipped tea.  I thought of winding through roads swept with yellow leaves with my friend Tonya (or Sonya, as she appeared in my columns), on our way to the local apple and peach orchard. 

I think, too, of a brilliant day when the sky was the color of my daughter's eyes, swinging myself up into an apple tree not far from town as Sally (or Sal, as she appeared in my columns) snapped photos of our children.

Our little house smelled wonderful and as my sister and brother-in-law, my cousin, my nieces and nephews and my own family spilled in the door from the chilly outdoors, I relished sharing it with them.  This process--harvesting, cooking slowly, eating together--the smelling and the stirring, the sugaring and the spicing--all of it recorded my belonging in a new place.

Tonight, stepping out of a hot shower, I looked in the mirror and read much of my life on my body: a series of maps that trace my daughters' first growth as they stretched and pushed from inside my belly.  I suddenly realized that each day in my life never feels truly finished unless I've processed it somehow, and as a writer, I do that by recording, by mapping.  When life is busy, I write the stories in my mind in a quiet moment, but that feels incomplete.  Settling myself here, then, must mean that I have to return to this place to find these words and share them with you. 

Writers often advise their students to let a life-changing experience stew for a while.  Walk around it slowly, smell it, taste it, let the flavors mingle.  Then offer it up.  I've waited for a few months now.  We're well and truly moved, but so much of my soul lingers behind.  How will I center myself in this new place?  Write, write, write.  It's time.  Thanks for waiting.

"Wazoo Goes West" will wait as I find a way to leave "Notes From. . ." behind.  Bodily, I left it some time ago, but the recording must still be done.  I'll try for as long as I can stand it and then I'll move on.

Happy Land

I sat down hoping to share with you.  But I'd prefer to share not my words, but my cookies.  All the gingersnaps our friend and once-student Natalie (who is staying with us for a month or so) and the girls made, the vegan chocolate cake (safely covered on the back porch) for a dear friend and precious colleague of Martin's, and the banana bread waiting in its foil for breakfast tomorrow.  These are my offerings for today.  I have little to offer in the way of words but I have a lot to feed you.

So I'll clip another little e-mail that my mother wrote to Merry and let that suffice for this evening. 

Grandaddy and I went to Happy Land this weekend.  We went for a walk and ended up there…lot’s of slimy mossy green water with boats with duck heads that you pedal to make it go.  It was lots of fun; it cost us about 30 cents to get in and another dollar to rent the boat.  There were funny statues that we will send you pictures of. 

Fancy a trip to Happy Land?  It will only cost you a mere thirty cents, which doesn't seem like anything to us--but from my quick research, is far too expensive for most Burmese families to afford.  If your daily wages are less than a dollar a day, Happy Land is not going to be on your agenda.  I did find a photo HERE.  Pretty crazy.

 Martin and his father worked on our 3/4 acre today, mowing and weed-whacking until they could barely walk straight.  But this last bit from my mother's e-mail certainly puts things into perspective:

Today I went a lovely long walk first thing in the morning, because it gets hot early in the day.  There were lots of people cutting grass…all with scythes, long knives, no lawn mowers here.  Can you imagine if your mom and dad had to cut your big yard that way?  And then there were women wearing bamboo hats who squatted down with smaller knives and went inch by inch pulling up each weed in the lawn.  They do that every day, all day long; they put kind of white paint on their faces so that the sun won’t turn their skin dark.  I carried an umbrella even though it wasn’t raining, to shade me from the sun.

Perched on a Strand of Buddha's Hair

Picture from Wikipedia--The boulder is covered with gold leaves adorned by devotees.  Read more about this amazing pagoda and its mythical story by clicking HERE.

From my parents in Myanmar:

I just heard a gecko revving up with his obnoxious call, kind of gargling at the first and then going into a loud, nasal geck-ooo, gecko; took me right back to our early days at Kamalganj. Inside our room we have a little tik tik lizard who chirrups occasionally. We traveled north from Yangon today to Mon State and got here a couple hours ago; I expected to drive up to a little hotel downtown on the main street, but instead we pulled up to an incredibly lovely “resort” in the middle of lush trees and flowers. We had driven through mile after mile of rubber plantations, and suddenly pulled into this wonderland. 

Driving up to the resort, we drove through rubber trees, rows of papayas, lemon trees, and interestingly, pan vines…the leaves they wrap betal nuts in. The pan leaves and the nuts are slightly narcotic and a hot item all throughout Asia. The dining area is a large open veranda with a teak floor…you leave your shoes before stepping onto it. It is surrounded by bougainvillea, frangipani trees, banana plants and coconut trees with orchids growing out of their bark. The air is dense with sweet smells and almost dizzyingly exotic. The hotel isn’t what you’d think of as a 5 star place; the rooms are semi-attached at the top of the hill, each with a sweet little veranda with two heavy wooden chairs, where we sat and watched the wind rustle the coconut palms for as long as we dared as darkness fell (it’s a malarial area). Our room has a small airconditioning unit that barely cools the room, two dim lights and no mosquito nets . There is a TV but no reception.

~

Now it’s Monday afternoon. We ate fried rice and egg for breakfast and took off by 6:30 a.m. to see the local attraction; it’s a big one. The Kyaikhtiyo pagoda rests on an unlikely foundation; an unwieldy rock balanced crazily upon another rock on top of a mountain. It is at this site that Buddhism came into Burma, and it is their most revered site. To get there, you leave your car at the foot of the mountain, climb a wooden platform onto a flatbed truck fitted out with two x four benches, each about five inches wide, jammed in at one foot intervals. After jamming every single person that can possibly sit on this arrangement--Meredith was sitting with his legs splayed out because there simply wasn’t enough space between benches to accommodate his legs--the truck lurched off up the mountain.

It was a crazy, amusement park kind of ride for the next 25 minutes, the truck went as fast as it could around hairpin turns, bouncing over potholes and careening from side to side. Everyone in the back of the open truck gripped the person next to them, braced to offset the current turn as one collective body, a strategy that was pretty good except when we hit a pot hole everyone bounced into the air and came crashing down into new formations. Meredith was holding on to the low rail as he was on the outside and I was clinging to his leg so I wouldn’t smash the old man behind me. It was a very entertaining ride and incredibly beautiful, reminding me of the pictures I have seen of the heavy forests in Rwanda, with mist coming off the hills. I almost expected to see gorillas coming out of the trees.

When we got to the end of the line, there was still close to a mile to hike up a very steep incline that zigzagged to the top. We could see the golden pagoda in the distance and knew we had better get going, as it was only going to get hotter. I think that I was about as hot as I can ever remember being. To our astonishment, there were curious contraptions right out of old, old pictures; a reclining bamboo chair on two bamboo poles, carried by 4 porters. There were plenty of them and one attached itself to us, asking if we would like to ride. We declined repeatedly, but they patiently and discretely walked behind us, much like vultures who knew we would fall eventually. It was so hot and steep, the air so thick that we were streaming with perspiration, I in my long skirt that was prerequisite for this area.

Your dad takes blood pressure medicine that dehydrates him when he is in the sun, and it was clear that this was not going anywhere good. He began to get nauseous and dizzy and his vision was swimming. (it was about a constant 30-40 degree incline on a concrete road in the full sun with little shade. The temperature was probably in the mid-80’s as we began and became hotter as the day wore on.   Dad really did not want to get into one of those chairs, but finally I persuaded him…I was afraid he was going to have heat stroke. He finally gave in and I DID NOT MAKE A JOKE OUT OF IT because he felt really bad. A staff member with us said she couldn’t go on and we finally persuaded her to take a chair as well. That left me, the government doctor and the driver and we took it carefully to the top.

There were lots of fancy buildings, one honoring the goddess who is believed to be looking after the mountain, and the pagoda, which is believed to be 2000 years old.

When we all got to the bottom again around 11:30, we bought drinks and expected to be able to get on the truck and return to our car, but it turned out that the truck only went when it got full. So there we waited for nearly two hours.

~

Mom and Dad finally got back to their rooms, where they drank water all afternoon.

More news from my parents, this time from my childhood home (see above), where my mother brought me back from the hospital after my birth. I remember so much though I was young. Note the lovely old brick paths--I can almost feel them warm under my bare feet.

One of my favorite memories or stories (when you are a small child they are often the same thing) is about Ebrahim, our old Bengali gardener who kept me out of trouble. My mother sent me this e-mail on Easter, for my birthday: "Here's a pretty gift. We were sitting under a shelter in the yard between what was our house and the guesthouse when a slight figure of a man with white beard and lungi walked up to us. My heart took a turn-it was for all the world Ebrhaim who was coming toward us. Turns out it was his son who insisted that we must come for a meal the next day. And we did, and they laughed and asked about Kimberly. You were born as the baby of the whole project, but as the special charge of Ebrahaim, who followed you devotedly as you went visiting house after house, spreading your joy."

I had just finished editing a poem about Ebrahim the night before, where I thank him for his tenderness with me and wish I could know him now I am grown up, a gardener myself with my own children. There was something so lovely about being remembered by people I have not seen in thirty years--when you grow up overseas, you rarely encounter anyone but your own family who has known you for that long. It made me long to see them again--Ebrahim himself, who died twenty years ago, and all the people who gifted me with their love so early, made me feel precious and worthwhile. I am deeply grateful.

Here's another photo, which took both my sister and I back to this familiar place--the jungle that Heather used to pull me away from, reminding me of snakes and death, the jungle that hung with orchids!--though in my memory the colors are purer and more vibrant.



But here is more of my mother's wonderful e-mail (just a part of the longer story of meetings with people we once knew):

So many memories flooded in as we walked from house to house...here's where the Ragans, etc. lived...here's the nurses' house where we went for tea and gamma globulin shots...here's the road (steep) where Meredith was on his freshly repaired bike, brake shoes installed backwards, went hurtling down the hill, across the main road, tossing him into the rice paddy....here's where the water buffalo went poggle (crazy) and stampeded down the path...remember taking the girls motorbike riding along here... We walked down to Mokamtilla, veering off up the hill where we would take Koolaid and M&M's on Sunday afternoons to picnic and watch the 4:00 o'clock train come by. It was stunningly lovely, walking along the crest of the hill, looking down across rice paddies, a cow here and there, ducks and woman w/her water buffalo, listening to a bird singing his 4-note song again and again.

In one of the houses, a leprosy patient still lives (illegally). She stepped out with her 12 year old daughter. The mother was bald and with only stumps for hands, and cradled her daughter with Down's syndrome so she would have the courage to step out. Meredith took her hands and talked to her until she began to smile; she was lovely. We rounded the corner and encountered Demond, who looked at Meredith in a shocked way and said, "Long Sab!" He had been a watch man while were there. I couldn't believe he remembered.

[My parents visit with people at two houses, and are fed well at both. At one of the homes the electricity goes out and they all sit on a bed and watch a magnificent storm through an open door].

Then on to Ebrahim's son's house, a welcome walk down the main road and across rice paddies to a surprise...a strong, cement house set up high in the middle of the rice paddies, complete with solar power lights. We were so happy to see how well they were living; they talked and laughed as they remembered you girls and we remembered Ebrahim together. They served us a bowl of noodles even before the curry meal arrived, and besides a chicken curry and vegetable curries, a special treat, fried duck eggs. We took pictures together, give them a gift in honor of Ebrahim and he hugged Meredith for a long time and cried. It was a precious visit.

___
After this my parents went on for yet another full meal--"We just couldn't keep up that level of eating," Mom wrote. "We are overwhelmed once again, at the deep hospitality of Bengalis and realize how much we were shaped by the years we lived here. How rich it was and how privileged we were to be here."

Airports, Poop Tea, and a Familiar Place

My parents have arrived back in the place of my early childhood. I received an e-mail from Dad this morning. I feel memories about me suddenly as if someone laid a coat around my shoulders--dusty Dacca (as it was spelled when we were there almost thirty years ago), the call to prayer early in the morning, marketplaces with oddly- shaped, wonderful balloons, the sounds of afternoon--planes high in the sky outside my window, calls in the street from beggars and peddlars, the clink of tin:

We're in very dusty Dhaka-in the Baptist Guest House. We get here about 1 am this morning and were in bed just after 2. Portus, the cook and helper has worked here for 25 years, and remembers seeing us before. Water shortage for flushing the toilet but things pretty much the same except the house is now surrounded by high rises.
Off to the office shortly.
Much love,
Dad

My mother wrote to us from Bangkok, and her memories are much stronger than mine:

So, we have just come from a swim in the lovely flat pool on the roof of the hotel, swimming in bathtub water, surrounded by banana plants, looking u[p at the moon and evening star and feeling as though we were in paradise. We walked into the evening air last night 24 hours after we had left home to the familiar thick air, sauna like and layered with rich and haunting smells. Suddenly I was back 25 years ago, a young woman with our children living a great adventure. Even the fact that the person in the plane in front of us had poured his tomato juice down through the seat over my sweater and carry-on case not to be discovered until hours later when it was coagulated and clinging, even though the hotel had put us in a smoking room...it was dizzyingly happy to be here.

We are back in the land of showers that simply happen on the bathroom floor, where you need to remember to close your mouth and not drink the water. Our hotel is across the street from the Dang Lee Massage Parlour, where the ladies lounge out front, extending their lovely legs out from their sarongs to attract passersby.

The sidewalks are crowded with tables with people eating wonderful things and the cars dart in and out between the people and motorcycles, and amazingly it all seems to fit together. We walked to the office past great piles of mangos...in season!...and vegetables I couldn't identify. At lunch we walked with others to an outside shelter about the size of a football field filled with long tables and chairs, edged with dozens of food vendors. We pushed our way through to a woman who let us point to what we wanted: fish, sticky rice and spinach. For about $1.10 we had a delicious meal in the happy chaos of all the noise and comings and goings of others. On the way back to the office, Kim Ta Teet, a beautiful Thai woman in her twenties, said she was going to a shop for tea, and would I like some? Yes, definitely. The tea turned out to be a milky tea in a large plastic cup with ice. Bouncing around the bottom were a pile of black pellets...with a laugh she said that she called it "poop tea". The pellets were like gummy bears, so you sucked it up with the tea and then chewed them. The children would have loved it!

Dad and I were really fading after lunch for a while; we had had about 4 hours of sleep in the past 36 hours.

And then I received a funny e-mail from my parents from the Kuala Lupur airport, which sounds like an incredible place:

Hi dear people. We are waiting in the Kuala Lupur airport for a flight to Bangladesh. The Bangkok airport is amazing with hundreds of glitzy shops, like a sophisticated mall that happens to have airplanes coming and going. This one too. There's a stunning jungle walk in the center of this concourse where you go through a mesh that is designed to keep birds in and you actually go outside into a jungle environment with big trees and vines and calls of birds and roaring waterfalls. It is surreal.

I suspect that the Bangladesh airport may not have reached this level yet.

This e-mail, which seems to have been written in a tearing hurry (I corrected some funny errors, such as "treesn vinesn calls of birds. . .) was followed by a pithy note from my father:

Mom hit the wrong button and we need to finish our $5 bottles of water!
Love,
Dad

I love that my mother is along with my father on this two-month trip; though they're both working hard the whole time, I think my mother will take time to write us detailed accounts of places we haven't seen since we were young children. Heather was eight when we left Bangladesh; I was turning six; and my brother was a toddler. Both he and I were born in Bangladesh.

Well, my own child summons. She's trying to make a "clam shell" out of two pieces of string and a paper plate, to very little success.

This is the sort of morning that fits me like a glove: cool, overcast, perfect for short-sleeve weeding. It's a Nairobi morning, and in my garden this morning, birdsong with black dirt under my fingernails and worm-squirm and distant laughter of children, I could almost smell bread baking at Adam's Arcade.

Adam's Arcade was a short walk away from our first home in Nairobi. We lived in the second-story flat of a large house belonging to an older couple who were on home-leave in the US. Since it would take almost a year for our shipment to arrive from America (due to extensive testing of my mother's dangerous bottle of McCormick Poppyseeds), the flat with its lovely old furniture, dusty puzzles, and enormous, screenless windows was perfect. An elderly British woman lived downstairs in a flowery apartment and she and my mother took tea on a regular basis. There was a large, sunny courtyard where I once took a sketchbook and toiled with my pencils over a sketch of a bicycle wheel. There was a pool but I never remember swimming in it, and there must have been a high gate with a night guard sitting in a little hut.

That was the house in the spreading trees where my mother caught a baboon on our dining room table, eating calmly from the fruit bowl. Baboons are not trustworthy, polite creatures and my mother chased his rubbery bottom all the way down the hallway and back out the window.

Nairobi was younger then. Friends tell me that it takes an hour or more just to drive across the city now. I haven't been back in fifteen years but my memories are as clear as if I left just a month ago. Mostly I remember colors and smells, the sound of my own voice as I opened a window, struck by the beauty of the city--thorny trees, bougainvillea climbing over thick hedges, the jangle of music and the distant roar of downtown traffic. I suppose it was dusty and loud and rather unsafe (almost everyone we knew had been robbed in one way or another), but it was the place of my childhood, and beyond that, it was objectively beautiful in many ways. Why is our culture so monochromatic? In Nairobi, color, color everywhere, on tin cups and matatus and clothes and up walls and in the market.

But today I'm thinking of Adam's Arcade, which we loved for its awkward concrete playground and difficult slide only manageable by squatting and sliding on the soles of your shoes. The bakery smelled different than any bakery I've sniffed since; it was a warm mixture, I suppose, of french bread and samosas and mandazi, mingling with the dust and exhaust of Nairobi. I don't remember many of its offerings beyond the chocolate croissants, which my mother asked for in a French accent since our Canadian friend, who worked for the embassy or the consulate or something important, had once mocked us for sounding American and uncouth. "A loaf of bread and three cwaasant," we ordered, and that's how we still pronounce them today, much to the vigorous mockery of Americans (like my husband), who chide us for being ridiculous.

Today the morning is a grey umbrella, and the air swims with birdsong and spring and the voices of my children on the porch. And I too, just for a few minutes, am a child, lifting my nose to find a rather mediocre bakery I once loved and anticipated as a world-class treat. Sometimes, just before sleeping, I find a place like that deep inside, and I long to stay in that cool place above worry and adulthood just long enough to slip into a dream, and soemtimes, if I'm lucky, I do.

*
For a vision of loveliness, as my mother says, see my friend Sal's photos (plus I got a little mention :) at her blog: Sally's Blog

from Marial Thon in the Southern Sudan airport

Dear All,

I'm waiting in a jumble of people in the Juba Intl Airport, sweating from every pore as people crowd into one another, many human scents wafting from our places of origin. The airport is not air-conditioned. There is one big room for all of the flights, domestic and international.

While I am writing the desk staff comes and check-in is done efficiently. I step around people to the immigration counter where they stamp my passport and then I fill in their register to give them a record of my visit. I go to security. I am given a quick pat down ignoring the lumps in my pocket and then through a metal detector that does not work.

My computer bag goes through the X-ray and the man tells me to take out the computer battery, which I do though he never looks at it except briefly when I hold it up.

I then pass into the one room departure lounge with very worn but fairly comfortable overstuffed leather chairs and sofas with crammed in everywhere suplemented by a few plastic chairs.

But before I sit down I have to pee. The door to the men's room lies directly in line with those coming into the room from security but there is not a door that will close. So those coming in get to see me standing at the urinal doing my thing. No washing hands here.

There is a sink but the entire top of the faucet-the part with the handle to twist, lies at the bottom of the basin, broken free from its threaded bounds.

But I'm on my way back to Nairobi and home-just waiting for the plane to land.

It's the five month birthday of Southern Sudan today-a new airport is being built built just down the way and I rejoice in their growing time.

Love,

Mere/Dad

Today, from Nairobi:

Enjoyed your blog on time. I built my workshop completely around proverbs and stories. So to begin to help folk understand that proverbs reveal something about the culture from which the people who created it came, I gave them two proverbs to consider. One was “A log can be in a river for a long time and never become a crocodile.” And the other was “Time is money.” I asked what they thought it meant, where they thought it was created and what it might show about the people who created it. The discussion of the last one brought out the huge differences that you referred to in the blog. It is not only chronos and kairos but time as repeated cycles vs a line. There is not sense of time as a commodity but, in facing modernity——[both have to be understood].

My correct Dinka name is Marial Thon (Thon pronounced with a silent “H” but aspirating the “T” sound but not the “O” sound as in “ton” but rather in “tone”). It means a “bull with black and white color & strong bull at the same time.”

Look forward to seeing you soon.

Love,
Dad

My dad recently left for Sudan. My mother told me he received instructions to bring food with him, since food there is sparse or nonexistent. . .so he took a big bag of trail mix. How long will this last him, I wonder?

Even in his remote location, he has access to e-mail, so he sent my mother a message that there is food though not much and the residents eat very small portions. I think he may lose quite a few pounds preChristmas. (It wouldn't surprise me if he gave away his trail mix--there's a family tradition of this. When she visited a refugee camp in Uganda, my sister boarded a UN plane back home wrapped in a tablecloth after leaving all her clothes behind. My mother has been known to slide curtains off the rod on the spot to gift them to a visitor who admired them. Keep an easy hold on things, my mother always taught us.)

Sudan gives me a bit of perspective; today, when I said, there's nothing for lunch, our refrigerator was full, our freezers packed. Our pantry overflows with cereal, cans, snacks, grains and pasta. We could survive for several months at least and eat heartily every day. What I meant this morning was, there's nothing prepared for lunch, as if making myself a pbj was a hardship. Or boiling noodles, or making soup, or defrosting a chicken.

On a lighter note, my mother just sent me this e-mail:
Your dad has been given a name by a group of Dinka women that is evidently a highly favored black and white bull, and they proceeded to teach him how to dance the bull dance. Sorry I missed that!

Maybe, she wrote in closing, he'll perform it for us this Christmas. Is that something we really want to see? My father, who has little inherent sense of rhythm, performing The Bull Dance?

Absolutely.

Just drove back from NYC. I walked the busy sidewalks with two wonderful women, and we left our collective nine children at home with their three respective dads. What a good time it was. We even got in on the demonstrations you heard about this morning on the news. At the park next to Wall Street, we walked through the crowd, received some literature, and, having seen our fill, ducked into an Irish pub. Later that night on our way to Serendipity for the largest, most obscene banana split I have ever seen, we saw a bus full of the demonstrators, who had apparently spilled across Brooklyn Bridge, handcuffed and filing into the police station. This morning on our way back to PA, we heard the drums of the marchers and said, "Wow! We were right there!" Pretty interesting.

Photos will follow: Grand Central Station, Central Park, The Smithsonian, the Staten Island Ferry (which we sprinted from the subway to catch at 11:30 last night)--and much more. The short verdict: I LOVED it.

Friday Night Picture Show

The water is vastly colder than it looks. Orcas Island, Puget Sound, Washington. Martin and our bro-in-law, Luke.










Feelin' groovy.

Happy Places

My friend Tonya put a basketful of swiss chard in the washing machine to disastrous consequences. She swears the rinse cycle works splendidly with spinach. Apparently chard is of a more delicate constitution.

Tonya has a big, productive garden, and she is of good Mennonite stock which means she can never. . .stop. . .working. . .She tells me she's up to her ears in peaches and she's already canned enough beans to build a replica of the Empire State Building. Plus she works two mornings a week and educates her children at home by cyberschool. My question is: when does she sleep?

Did I mention she has a flock of chickens? And a penchant for personal, physical disaster? Since I've known her she has almost shot her eye out with a hunting rifle, stumbled backwards into a ravine that was hiding a nest of bees, and bashed herself countless times on countless objects.

Last evening, she was already doubled over with pain from a previous injury, but continued wildly chopping basil to more unfortunate consequences. . .the permanent loss of the tip of her thumb.

There are these miniature children's books that Merry used to like about sad bunnies (by Rosemary Wells, I think) who endure horrible things and get rescued by a Queen bunny named Janet who then takes them to the Bunny Planet so they can experience the day that should have been.

Tonya, let's go to the bunny planet.
Or to the shores of Orcas Island, on the placid cool waters of the Puget Sound. Only the sound of a paddle in water, mountains rising around you, the hope of a seal.
Ah. . . .

Bottom Dwellers

Check these guys out. I want to call the fish "A Mudsucker" or a "Dogfish" but I don't think either of those were right. My eight-year old nephew, Josiah, flipped over a barnacle-covered rock, swooped his hand down into the muck underneath, and fished (ha,ha) this fine fellow right out of his fearful floundering. (Ha,ha, and it's definitely not a flounder). Wait, wait, he perched on the edge of the rock. . .I'm trying hard but I my fishy puns are at an end. My public will be devastated.

He flounder, and then, sadly, he lobster. (I stole that line from an unknown source).

And who knew starfish could look like this? Actually, the creature below is not a starfish but a seastar. Look at all those legs. . .so much more amazing than the stock starfish I learned from preschool flipbooks.

They come in plummy purple, too.

I was walking among the tidal pools when I slipped on a mass of seaweed, flew in between two rocks, and grated my leg on a patch of barnacles. Following this event, I enjoyed a round of antibiotics, one tetanus shot, and many evenings of discomfort. The scabs have just fallen off, and my leg is pink and gorgeous. Nobody else whacked themselves. . .the children are like goats on the rocks, surefooted. If anyone can think of a better, more oceanic simile, I would be grateful.

Today I am once again with the children while Martin pays the piper at school. Why did I think going to Target (through construction traffic) was a wonderful idea? I have a massive bag of toilet paper but I'm not sure it was worth it. I threw the kitchen sponge at my middle daughter today after she smeared toothpaste on the wall. My zen is shot and I am becoming a bottom-dweller, a Mudsucker, a Dogfish. School starts in one and a half days. . .60 hours and 12 minutes, not that I'm counting. (Just kidding, I didn't really count--I just pulled that number out of midair.) There's some really great stuff under rocks, for the record, and it stays pretty cool and shadowy. Maybe you should crawl under one and join me.

Seattle Summer

I thought I'd start with Seattle photos and move up the coast toward Canada. Look for: the Space Needle, the International Fountain, and the Rock n Roll museum. Should be a three out of three for all of you. :) The kids that are not mine are my niece(s) and nephew.

Snatched from an e-mail from Martin to his staff at the literary magazine back in PA

Hello, Editorial Staff!

I'm writing you from a craftsman bungalow on an island just west of Victoria, Canada, in the shadow of the North Cascades and towering Mt. Baker. Yesterday I kayaked around a rocky point, water clear to depths of ten or more feet, seals bobbing their heads all around me. At one point, both a bald eagle and a sea plane flew over me at the same time.

This is part of why I haven't been as motivated as I should be to get things going for the fall.

Beatrix, running on mountains overlooking Missoula, Montana
Photo snapped by Elspeth

I just finished a small mountain of spanikopita (did I spell that right? I'd check but dinner is imminent) and a glass of Riesling. We are waiting for dinner to brown sufficiently; today I bought two fabulous salwar kameez (one ridiculously pink) from a local and splendidly stocked thrift store. I wonder where I might wear these in our little southwestern PA town? Perhaps at the local grocery with the farming and coal mining clientle (mixed with neighbors I know): me in my sequins and poofy pink pants, selecting corn on the cob. I think dinner parties are in order.

I miss home but I am enjoying myself immensely. Not reading as much as I should. Today I began rereading "Woman Warrior" for a class I'll teach in the fall.

Ah, I hear my mother clinking silverware, which means my time at this keyboard is limited. For more complete thoughts on home, a glimpse into our travels in the south, and a bit of sentimentality, read my O-R column from last week by clicking on the geranium at right.

And in personal news: rejections continue but silver linings include an award of distinction from Midwest Literary Magazine for my story, "Birds in Snow" and an upcoming publication in the children's magazine, "Ladybug." Hurrah. Children's stories are such lovely fun.

It was a very bad day. . .

We're back in Edmonds, Washington, on a warm day so clear you can see the craggy, snow-capped peaks of Mt. Baker. The Puget Sound reaches sparkling to the foot of the Olympic mountains. We spent the day sitting on driftwood, watching the children wading deeper and deeper into the cold water and eating tart cherries from my sister's garden.

Now we're back in my parent's lovely little apartment, enjoying the breeze through the open door. Martin's doing the Sunday crossword, my Dad is snoozing with the Economist open and limp on his lap, and Merry's eating chips and chatting up a storm with my mother, who is making tea.

Mom just told us a funny little story about my sister's youngest little girl, Eliora, who is three. On a trip to Germany recently to visit her other grandparents, she surprised my sister when, late into the flight, she looked up into my sister's face, and said, "Let me tell you something. When we land, the plane will break into a hundred little pieces."

"Why would you think that?" my sister asked.

"Because," Eliora explained calmly, "The plane has no wheels."

"Yes, it does," Heather reassured her. "They'll come down soon, with a big thumping sound."

"No." Eliora extracted the safety information from the seat pocket. "The plane has no wheels and when we land, it will break into a hundred little pieces. See?"

Heather perused the safety pamphlet and Eliora was right: in every picture depicting the plane, there were no wheels. Apparently Eliora had been studying this pamphlet a good part of the long flight and had come serenely to the conclusion that it would crash when it hit the tarmac.

"Let me tell you a story," Eliora said. "Once there was a family who went on a plane. The plane flew and flew and then it landed and broke into a hundred pieces. The family landed in the mud. It was a very bad day."

Thankfully, Eliora's research, though thorough, did not yield the conclusion she believed it would, and Heather and the children landed safe and sound in Germany. And in the end, it was a very good day.