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My attempts to revitalize the blog aren’t going so well. The problem is time, time management, and time sucks like Twitter, where people are so much funnier than I am.
It’s a really long time since I’ve written at all regularly, and I would imagine pretty much anyone reading this is new here. So here’s a bit of background and an update. I live in Oregon, but I spent 9 years of my life in North Africa, plus a year in France. I started this blog while we were living in Mauritania, which was so different from anywhere we’d experienced before that we used to say in wonder, “It’s like another planet.” Our nickname for Mauritania was, in fact, Planet Nomad, since they still retain a lot of their very-recent nomadic past. And that’s where the name of the blog came from, although of course it also worked well as a name for us, a family who moved internationally 6 times in 9 years, and who continue to live cross-culturally wherever they land.
Random pic of Latourell Falls, down the Columbia River Gorge. Oregon is beautiful!
In 2010 we moved back to Oregon, and started working with Iraqi refugees, and that’s kind of when the blog died. My kids were teenagers, and as funny and infuriating as ever but much more aware of social media. And my new friends were internet-savvy and had such dramatic stories that I didn’t feel right telling them. I’ve always been careful, changing names and some details so that my Mauritanian friends would never feel exploited if they ever stumbled across the blog, but this felt different. Plus, so much of it was about raising kids and living in a culture not your own. So the blog died, in spite of my efforts to write of our visits back to North Africa and France.
So now, my kids are all grown. Elliot lives in Iceland, where he’s in grad school, getting a very practical MA in Medieval Norse and Viking Studies. That’ll just open doors for him around the world, right? He speaks about 6 languages now*, and I am v smug about this, because I told him that someday he would be grateful to me for making him go to French school, that first year when he cried every Sunday and said he didn’t want to go and refused to speak French. There are few things in life more satisfying than telling your kids, “I told you so!” The essence of good parenting in a nutshell!
*(I counted Icelandic but I really shouldn’t, since he is learning Old Icelandic by translating the sagas, so all he can say are phrases like “Thor swung his hammer and shattered the giant’s skull.” Fun, but probably not going to be super helpful if you need to know where the bathroom is.)
Ilsa is going to art school on the other side of the continent, in Rhode Island. Donn suggested she go straight to homeless as a way to avoid having school debt plus being homeless, but she declined. She is majoring in Painting, and will someday no doubt have a gorgeously-decorated section of the sidewalk to call home. She is very talented.
Abel lives at home, which makes me happy. He is working, photographing a lot, and keeps very busy with needing to rewatch “The Office” and “Parks and Rec.” I assume he does other things as well? He is never home and when he is, he’s either editing pictures or glued to his phone, watching Netflix. I think he’s doing well? Seriously, he’s a talented photographer, in an age when it’s nearly impossible to earn a living that way. Between our kids’ choices, Donn and I are almost certainly going to be joining them on the sidewalks in our old age. At least they will be beautiful, and we can pass our golden years learning about Thor and his hammer, and maybe adding some Icelandic vocabulary to our requests for spare change.
Donn and I now have an official non-profit. (Ilsa did that pic on the homepage, if you click through that link). Donn is the president. I am the Director of the ESL program, and we’ve grown a lot–we now have 5 levels and about 60 students if everyone comes (which they don’t), plus a small army of volunteers teaching them, ferrying people back and forth, watching little ones so their mothers can concentrate on English for two hours straight, etc. I actually love my job, except that it keeps me from spending hours staring out the window, reading books, and drinking tea, but all my jobs do that. I do drink a lot of tea but it tends to be in my students’ homes, accompanied by a lot of food and conversation.
Many of the attendees at the ESL Thanksgiving Party. We ate turkey and qubbah and potatoes and dolma and biryani and pumpkin pie and baklava.
And now that we’re all caught up, I will resume my travel writing. Come back for more pics of Thai temples, a treatise on the toilets of SE Asia (no really, I have to show you these signs), and if you’re lucky, pictures of various lunches! You know you care what I had for lunch, at least while in Chiang Mai!
Abel ready to go!
This summer, Donn’s mother broke her hip. They live in the Southern California desert, and she went outside barefoot in the blazing sun to get the mail, and fell. We rearranged our lives and spent nearly a month total with her after she got out of rehab, and she was stubborn and determined and did really well. Then, in November, her heart stopped. Happily she happened to be at a concert held at a retirement center, and a nurse stepped in. But that fire and determination were lacking the second time around. She just wasn’t fighting as hard. And so we put our heads together and decided to drive down the 1200 miles and surprise her for Christmas.
Every year, we hold a Christmas party for our Iraqi refugee friends, and every year, it just gets bigger and bigger. It’s always held the Friday before Christmas, which was of course the 22nd. This year, we had about 250 guests, mostly from Iraq, with a good representation from Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Iran as well. It was a huge success. The food was fantastic! We had it catered by a local Iraqi restaurant which does great dishes, and we went all out…kabobs, chicken skewers, falafel, hummus, bread. For dessert we had baklava and then a friend made hundreds of orange-fig shortbread cookies and coconut lime shortbread cookies that were amazing. We had an awesome program for the kids, run by talented people who run our church’s all-day summer camps, fantastic live music, and SnapBar donated their services!
We had tons of help but it was still exhausting. And so, it was with no great joy that we dragged ourselves out of bed the following morning, loaded the car, and headed south. Abel, who is still youthful and energetic, was the only one excited at that point. Donn and I were just trying to make sure we’d packed everything–the air mattresses, the presents, the snacks, the plates of food that Iraqi friends had made up for us to bring. Because yes, that was a feature. We had a plate of leftover kabobs, plus an ENORMOUS platter of fresh falafel and 2 plates of hummus from another friend, and a plate of quba from someone else. It was, frankly, a bit much. We drove to Eugene and Elliot’s house, where we ate lunch and left some falafel and hummus for his roommates to enjoy.
I suck at selfies
We drove down through the forests of Oregon, which don’t seem like much until you leave them behind. Of course it was dark shortly after 4. We wound our way through the foothills of Mt Shasta, then hurtled down I-5 to Sacramento, where Ilsa lives.
Blue winter’s sunset, somewhere at the bottom of Oregon
We picked up Ilsa and saw her new apartment and met her puppy, who wiggled out of her arms with joy at meeting new people. We went for pizza, crowding round a small table in a noisy bar because the restaurant end of things was already closed at 10 p.m. on a Saturday. One thing I did not expect to find in Sacramento was the best Starbucks I’ve ever been to, serving juniper lattes and affragatos and all done in cool blonde wood and stainless steel, huge and beautiful and open till midnight.
After that, we settled into the dreary part of the trip. Because we hadn’t been able to leave till December 23rd and because we needed to get to Hemet in time for me to do some shopping on Christmas Eve before the shops closed and because we were now 5 and that meant 2 hotel rooms, we’d decided to drive the night through. We’d rented a car–our Volvo sedans don’t really have room for 5 adults, 4 air mattresses, presents, luggage, etc–but the kids were still too young to be able to drive. Donn and I spelled each other, the passenger trying desperately to sleep while the driver played music to stay awake. Amazingly enough, no one got grumpy. We were all too happy to be together again, excited to surprise Grandma, tearing through the night which stayed dry and bright.
These photos are from my snapchat
We stopped in a rest area for a while, where Elliot and Donn made fun of my desire for an eyeshade to help me sleep under the glare of the street lamps. “Something to cover your eyes? What about eyelids?” they quipped while I glared at them. Then we drove on again, into a terribly bright sunrise where all was certainly bright, and mostly calm too.
We stopped at Starbucks time and time again. I know all the arguments against this store but I don’t care. You can get decent coffee all the way to the inlaws now, and that’s always a good thing. We stopped for breakfast at one point, playing for time as we were in danger of arriving before my mother in law was up.
Finally we arrived. Abel knocked on the door. “Come in!” we heard her yell. We all trooped in, holding our phones like shields in front of our faces as we filmed her. “Merry Christmas!” we yelled! She just sat there, in shock. My father in law appeared with tears in his eyes. We’d made it, we’d surprised her, and, as they’ve told me approximately 1000 times a day, we were the best Christmas present ever! All together now, “Awww….” Also, I am, as always, their favorite (and only) daughter-in-law. So there’s that.
Christmas in the desert. I personally think they’re trying too hard…
Happy New Year to you all! Any plans for 2018?
I wrote this post last September and never posted it. It seemed to fit at this point of my year in review, so here it is.
Things no one tells you about when your daughter goes to college:
- You can’t really trust your husband or son’s dress sense. Do those heels go with leggings? (Donn: It looks fine to me? Abel: shrugs) Is this shirt too casual for teaching? (Donn: Hmmm. Maybe? Abel: It looks fine to me.) Too much cleavage? (Donn: No! Abel: Mo-om! Gosh!)
- She took your fingernail polish remover. All of it. You will discover this when you’re redoing your toenails at the last minute before an evening out.
- All the fun jewelry you used to borrow sometimes? It’s gone too. Along with some of your earrings.
- Your sock drawer? Completely decimated. She left you two pairs–a black pair for boots and a purple pair for the gym.
- Five is a nice number. I was going to say an even number, but then you would tell me it’s actually an odd number. I had started a 5th thing, back in September, but I can’t remember what it was. I guess I could be serious and say how much you’ll miss your daughter, but you knew that anyway. Everyone knows that.
…in which I divide my year into two three parts cuz it was oh-so-interesting.
September: Ilsa is off to Rhode Island for art school, which is pretty much exactly opposite Portland, Oregon, and nearly as far as you can get and still be on the same continent. Meanwhile, her twin brother is staying home and going to the local community college. They’ve always been opposites in every way, so it’s reassuring to see that continuing. Right?
She got FF miles from her grandpa, so Donn and I ended up having to take the red-eye the night before, arriving in Boston at 7 a.m. Donn had cleverly googled “how to get out of Logan Airport without paying tolls” so we drove for hours and hours, down bumpy railroad tracks and through sketchy-looking industrial areas, eventually ending up far to the north east of Boston, when our hotel was far to the south west (towards Providence, which is an hour south of Boston). By this point it was after 10 and we were starving. No tolls though! Triumph! We found a hole-in-the-wall diner with wonderful eggs and bacon and low prices and thick china and where everyone talked like they’re supposed to in Boston. “They-ah, dea-ah,” said the waitress as she banged down the plate in front of me. (I’m not sure I’m doing the dialect right) We asked for directions to the hotel, and she yelled at the guys in the back and they came out and looked at the address and talked amongst themselves for ages before telling us which alleys and lanes to traverse on our way back to the toll road that didn’t require us to buy a special Boston pass, which also required an extra $20 to the rental car company. This was the real reason we were avoiding certain roads. We had to pay tolls (question: WHY? The roads were not that amazing) but we preferred to pay cash rather than have to buy a special gadget for a short visit.
People do complain about east-coast drivers. We thought they were fine, if a bit confused at times…
Yes, that’s a holiday-weekend-start-of-college-busy road in one direction only.
We eventually found our hotel, and they let us check in early so we passed out on the bed for a few blissful hours. (Remember, we’d been up all night) It was a super cute, very fun hotel, set in the middle of a sort of commercial wasteland. We drove back into Boston and drove to the Common and looked for parking. We ended up finding a place just across from Cheers, so we went in for a pint, but no one knew our name, it was crowded and no one was glad we came, and the beer was $7.50 a pint for something that claimed to be an IPA but wasn’t. It just wasn’t.
Swan at Boston Common
This was later though. At first we wandered round and found someplace to eat. We were somewhat bemused to find that Portland, OR is trendy place in Boston. We saw menus proudly touting their use of Tillamook cheddar and Willamette Valley hops, and the guy at the front desk told us he’d always wanted to come to Oregon. And after that pseudo-IPA, I could see why!
We walked part of the Freedom Trail, which was super cool and interesting. We collected Ilsa at the airport at midnight, drove 45 minutes to the hotel, and unsurprisingly missed breakfast the next morning.
Boston at night…
We had a day to explore before taking Ilsa to school, so we went to Concord, and Lexington.
We explored the outside of Louisa May Alcott’s home and also the gift shop.
This perfect tree is just outside the Alcott family home, and it was all too easy to imagine Jo (from Little Women) sitting here eating apples.
We wandered through the Boston Common, where we saw 3 different bridal parties having photos done.
This just amused me, the bride frowning at her phone, the limo driver taking pics with the groom’s phone (not pictured).
The next day, we drove down to Providence and left Ilsa in her own little dorm room, at the top of a hill and on the 4th floor. No elevators. She was ecstatic to be there, and waved us off with a big smile, anxious for us to go and leave her to the serious business of Being a College Student.
On the plane on the way home, I read a book written by a woman who was raped on her second day of college. I do not recommend this. It was a good book, but still. Dang! Ilsa was fine though.
Here is Donn, checking the wording of the Constitution on his phone so as to help the Founding Fathers get it right. (They had these panoramas (diaromas? Cardboard cutouts? What would you call this?) set up at Logan Airport.)
AND I think we’re going to have to stretch this into 3 parts, since in October, we went to Thailand…
Well this was the year I basically let the blog die. I only posted 5 times all year, and the last time was in April!
Blogging is basically dead as an art form. Few read, fewer comment. It seems the only ones still going are some sort of niche. But I’ve decided that I’d like to revive the old girl (my blog is a girl. Yours?) after all, and post sporadically about whatever I feel like. So let’s start with me getting you all caught up about last year chez the Nomad family.
2015 was a good year with lots going on. So much, in fact, that I’m going to put this into two posts. See? 2 posts in the first week. I’m off to a great start! In the meantime, here is Jan-Aug.
January: we come home from an afternoon out to find ourselves banned from the kitchen. Ilsa is applying to art schools, and one requires that she draw a bike. Since we live in Oregon where it’s cold and dark by 5, she has put the bike in the kitchen and is lying on the floor, drawing and drinking tea. We are not allowed to bump the bike. We manage to get out cheese and crackers for dinner.
She got in! This was for her first choice, RISD (riz-de), officially known as the Rhode Island School of Design. We’ll get to the implications of this in September.
January also saw a friend from Mauritania visit. It was his first time visiting a Western country. A lot of things were new to him. For example, he had hoped to meet with some local officials, but really didn’t understand how far out he would have needed to schedule something like that. Seat belts were also very new to him. He was a good sport, although I know this had to be like another planet to him.
February is lost to the mists of time, which keep growing thicker with my advancing age. Seriously, I suppose we did something?
March: The twins turned 18. Ilsa always chooses cinnamon rolls for her birthday breakfast. I accidentally doubled the recipe–which makes tons even normally–so we had a million or so cinnamon rolls. The neighbours, random Iraqi friends, and of course the twins were very happy. I use the Pioneer Woman’s recipe, modified to not kill us quite so quickly (i.e. 1% milk instead of whole, half the amount of butter, etc), and with cream cheese frosting instead of that nasty muck she puts on hers.
April, May…I dunno. Life. Stuff. Hiking, visits from people. Oh I dyed my hair red! I’ve always wanted to be a redhead. As I’d suspected, I looked good, but it quickly faded to orange, which didn’t look good. Also I went to Memphis as part of a blog tour for St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. It was a really cool time and I only managed to blog half of it, as is my wont.
June: This is where it gets interesting, as we began the Summer of The Visitors. Seriously, we had out-of-town guests almost nonstop from June through mid-August.
First of all, the twins graduated from high school.
Donn’s family came for graduation, and his parents stayed for a week, which is always a bit like having Archie and Edith from All in the Family to stay. Happily we didn’t have to go camping this time. Donn’s sister Kris, who reads this blog, and her husband came for the first week and then decided to stay for an extra two weeks. They stay in a hotel, so they are very easy visitors. We went down the gorge, ate giant ice cream cones from Salt & Straw, ate fresh berries, and did other summery, family-type things, like going to Powells.
Elliot came home for 2 days and then left for a summer in Jordan, where he spent the summer in an intensive language program. This was a government-sponsored scholarship, starting with a day of orientation in DC. When his 6 a.m. flight was cancelled, we waited in line for several hours only to have the airline clerk tell him they couldn’t fly him out till midnight that night, which would mean he’d miss orientation. We agreed, and were leaving the airport while he called the program to let them know. “Unacceptable, soldier!” they told him. (Not really. That is just a line from a Bourne movie.) And they put him on a flight leaving at noon. How? The person working for the airline couldn’t do it. Only the government. (Cue creepy Twilight music here).
I told Elliot that someone had probably gotten bumped. He was thrilled when they actually paged a “John M Caine” while he was waiting to board. Oh, we watched the Bourne movies too often when he was younger.
This picture was taken after his flight was cancelled and he was put on another one 5 hours later, so we took him out for breakfast. It’s still very early in the morning, which is probably why he looks so bleary.
He had a great time in Jordan. He lived with a host family and took classes and went on cultural excursions and saw ancient ruins and was tired and busy and hot and actually missed us.
July: For most of July, a friend from Morocco was here. (She’s Moroccan, but I first knew her and her family in Mauritania) We had a great time. We went hiking down the gorge, went to the coast, went downtown and ate giant ice cream cones at Salt and Straw, went to the Rose Garden and Powells, and just generally had a good time. It was her first time in America. We have now seen each other in 3 countries, and we are wondering where we’ll meet up next. Any ideas?
It was the hottest summer ever. It was terrible. We had a dry winter, a normal spring (wet and cool), and then a hot, dry summer. Sumi and I went to a lavender festival in Hood River on a day when it was over 100 degrees. Even though we lived in the Sahara desert together, we both agreed that we hated the heat.
This may not look like drought to you, but nonetheless it was a bad year. Lakes and rivers were really low, and several Oregon counties had to declare emergencies.
At the end of July, another friend came to see Sumi. We were all in Mauritania at the same time. Michelle now lives in Kansas, from which it’s easier to fly to Oregon than Morocco. We had a whirlwind few days of it, including eating giant ice cream cones from Salt & Straw. This was a theme of the summer. Actually, it’s kind a theme anyway. Come visit! We are used to people visiting and will eat ice cream anytime of year. The lines are shorter in winter.
August: Sumi left, then Michelle left, then the next day we got a visit from some French friends of ours, a family we knew in Morocco. It was blazing hot during their visit, so hot that we couldn’t enjoy being outside, even though we took them for giant ice cream cones. We went down the Gorge to Hood River on a Friday and it was 104 degrees. The next day we went to the beach and it was 65, and so foggy we couldn’t see the water while actually standing on the beach. Obviously, Oregon hates them. I don’t know why, as they are actually very nice.
Also, we saw a seal! Seal in French is “phoque” and if you exclaim that word excitedly to children on a public beach in America, you will get some side glances.
Elliot also came back mid-August from Jordan and was actually home for 2 entire weeks. Donn and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, although we waited to celebrate properly till November. More on that later. Ilsa got all 4 of her wisdom teeth out at once and was really funny while coming out of anesthesia. Also really difficult. Pain Med Ilsa is not very nice.
Tintype (taken with app on my phone) of restaurant where we ate on actual 25th wedding anniversary. We are officially old now, although according to Ilsa, we have been for years. Oddly comforting, in a way.
…
So once again I’ve proved that I really don’t have time to maintain a blog, at least not the way I write. Maybe if I was doing short accounts of my day. But I think you’d be bored with that. My life isn’t all that blog-worthy.
December is once again winding down. What happened this year? We traveled for a month, which is really too long when you have high school seniors, I have to say. The kids did great, even fantastic, but they really needed their mum for things like college apps and planning larger homework assignments and talking to teachers and things like that. It also took a tremendously long time to recover from. I don’t just mean jet-lag; that was normal. Donn and I returned bone-tired from traveling for a month. It took us probably 3 weeks to get over it, and even then I maintained a sort of vagueness, or numbness, that endured into the Christmas season. I just couldn’t get into doing things, and as a result was the most disorganized I’ve ever been. I started Christmas shopping on December 20th. The nice thing about doing that is it enlarges the holiday, as presents arrive in the days following. “On the second day of Christmas my mother gave to me, yet another thing from Amazon.” All together now! “On the third day…”
In retrospect, December seems like a nice month. Elliot came home. We got a large cheap tree which is actually really ugly, with several huge holes, but it’s a 10 foot noble that cost $10 so there.
See? Magical, I tell you. Or at least real. One or the other.
We had our annual party for our Iraqi refugee friends, about 200 of them, and that was crazy but good. I realized that I kind of know how to plan a party for 200 people, a talent that is outside of the rest of my skill set, which mostly involves reading novels really fast and making good pies, not to mention the ability to drink astonishing amounts of coffee.
I tried to gain weight and succeeded! Yaay! I’m not a loser! Of course most people would think I should be, but I decided to enjoy the mince pies guilt-free this time round. January with its cold hard reality of scales and dutifully-eaten veggies will come soon enough, and if I eat enough shortbread I might actually look forward to some austerity.
On December 23rd, Donn and I went downtown. I had to stop by Powell’s to get Ilsa a book she really really wanted, and so we braved the holiday traffic and found parking a mere 7 blocks away. The queue was the longest I’ve ever seen, stretching to the back of the store. I put Donn in line and rushed away to get the book and look for a Dr Who travel mug for Abel (they had nothing!), and by the time I got back he was at the front of the fast-moving, super-organized line. That’s teamwork! Afterwards we walked around, had a slice and a cold IPA, and wonder of wonders, saw the Unipiper in person!
The Unipiper is a Portland institution, a young man who spreads joy throughout our world by riding a unicycle and playing the bagpipes while wearing a kilt and a Darth Vader costume. (He also sometimes dresses as Gandalf. Truly he is a delight) He kind of makes you wonder what you’ve accomplished with your life. We heard the whine of the pipes from a block away and we came with haste to see him. We found him signing an autograph for a young man, and he wrote, “May your side always be dark.” And we put it on Instagram and Facebook.
Christmas Day was quiet, not to mention filled with envelopes of printed pictures to be opened (of the things that had been ordered and not yet been shipped). We ate a lot and lazed around a lot, which is how it should be if at all possible. We are having a LOTR themed Christmas, in which we attempted to see the Hobbit: Bloated Beyond by Peter’s Fan-Fic or whatever it’s called, only to find the cheap seats sold out. (A local chain does $5 Tuesdays, and if we miss we tend to wait for the following week) So we watched the first 2 parts, and then segued into watching the LOTR trilogy. Since I haven’t sat down and watched them in about 10 years, I’m really enjoying them.
And there you are. Caught up. Bored. Whatever. How was your December? What did you do this year?
I’m sitting here wondering when, if ever, this cake will be done. I was supposed to be at Noor’s an hour ago, the cake was supposed to be finished 38 minutes ago, and the center is still soggy and the pick inserted is most definitely not clean, if somewhat delicious to lick. I suppose it’s my own fault for making one giant cake, to be carefully cut into two layers, instead of using two pans as the recipe instructed. It just seemed easier at the time.
Today is Elliot’s 3rd birthday celebration this year alone, which ought to tell you how thoroughly he is spoiled. He turned 19 last Friday, and I got up and went berry-picking and made him a breakfast of French toast (pain perdu, for my overseas readers) with blueberries and marionberries, maple syrup, bacon, and lashings of hot coffee even though it was approximately 185 degrees outside.
Then he had to go to work. He has a very good summer job at Fred Meyer’s, which is a local store sort of like…well I think they’re sort of unique. They are first and foremost a grocery store but they also have apparel and home goods and garden centers and they sell nearly everything, for good prices, and they have great customer service and manage to treat their employees well too. I am a loyal customer. He worked till 10 that night, so we did his birthday supper (carne asada and home-made guac) the following night.
Tonight, Wed, he is having some friends over to conquer the world. I should have known, when we got him started with LOTR Risk at the age of 10, where this would end up. Axis and Allies is a super-boring game, with instructions that fill a literal book, and it takes up my entire dining room table, but it makes him happy. So tonight is cake and homemade pizza and frankly, I could not have picked a worse day to have my oven on for extended periods of time.
We are having an unusually hot summer, in case I haven’t made that clear already. Today it’s about 93, which is unusual for the Portland area. I took one of those quizzes on Facebook about what kind of career is ideal for me, and surprisingly it didn’t mention “person who complain incessantly about the heat.” I know you are thinking that I lived in the Sahara Desert for nearly 6 years, so surely I can handle a little oppressive sun and windless air. And you’re right–I certainly have a different perspective than I used to–but I also still manage to get off a few “It’s SOOO hot!”s in every hour or so.
Well the cake is finally out, although it’s rather alarmingly cracked on the top. I will frost it with ganache and candied orange slices, and it’s Elliot’s very favorite cake because it’s really rich and tastes a bit like one of those Lindt dark chocolate-orange bars, also his favorite. I’m off to Noor’s.
Once upon a time, there was a woman who lost wedding rings.
She was happily married so it wasn’t a reflection on her secret view of her husband or anything psychologically revealing like that. And she wasn’t an especially careless woman. True, she was organizationally-challenged, but she managed to hold onto most things. And yet, by her 23rd year of marriage, she had gone through 4 rings.
The first ring wasn’t lost. Bought on a college student budget for a thin young woman, it was a circlet of gold topped with a small twinkling diamond. 5 years later, pregnant with her first, she found the ring no longer fit her and decided to wear her husband’s.
She lost it gardening. Cleaning out flower beds in Portland, OR, involves a lot of heavy clumps of clayish soil snaked throughout with a dense mat of grass roots, and after a strenuous afternoon, she was pretty sure the ring was somewhere in the middle of a large yard debris container.
No worries. Her mother had recently passed on to her a ring that had belonged to her great-grandmother. It was thick Welsh gold, 22-caret, and she loved it. It was a little big at times but seemed to fit just fine at others, so she didn’t worry about it and wore it happily. One fine crisp autumn day, she took her 3 children (Elliot, then about 3, and the twins in their stroller) to a nearby park, where she and Elliot had a leaf fight, scooping up handfuls of bright colourful leaves and dumping them over each others heads, shrieking. When she got home, she realized her ring was gone.
Her husband had just gotten home, and he asked her to describe where exactly the leaf fight took place. She told him (near the swings, there’s this little concrete area and it’s to the side of that). He went back in the failing light and, miraculously, managed to find her ring.
Amazing! She was very grateful, not to mention pretty darn ecstatic to have not lost a family heirloom.
A few years later, the family moved to Mauritania. It’s a hot desert country with not a lot to do, and family quickly got into the habit of driving about 15 km north of town and going to the beach on Saturdays. The woman was always very careful to remove her ring before going swimming, as she knew it would float right off. She enjoyed swimming, even though the current was rough, and then drying off and eating snacks under the large Mauritanian tent they set up for shade.
One week, she had finished swimming, dried off, put her ring back on, and was relaxing with a book, when her husband came in from surfing. “Come try surfing,” he begged her. She said no, but eventually he persuaded her. And, fatally, she forgot to take her ring off. It was lost to the pale green waters of the Atlantic.
This time there was no other ring to be had, and it wasn’t like the family just had extra cash to buy one. She went years without a wedding ring until, one Christmas, her husband surprised her with a gorgeous gold band with 3 diamonds that he’d bought and had someone else bring across the seas. It was such a pretty ring that she frequently got compliments on it, especially as the diamonds were unusually sparkly.
This ring lasted the longest (so far!) of all the wedding rings. She got it Christmas 2005 and, although it frequently fell off when she was doing laundry or sometimes if she gestured strongly, she always noticed and found it straight away.
Last Tuesday, she took advantage of Oregon’s lovely summer weather and excellent berry options and took an Iraqi friend of hers strawberry picking. They ranged far and wide, filling their boxes with the smaller sweet Hood variety as well as the bigger juicier Bentons. As is customary when picking berries, our heroine stooped over the small plants, lifting the stems with her left hand to find the ripe red berries hiding underneath.
After they’d finished, the 5 year-old Iraqi child wanted to play in the play area, so she and her friend sat on a picnic bench and relaxed. They fed the baby berries until her little face was red with smushed fruit and smiling happily. At one point, the woman went to wash her hands at the handy little sink provided by the berry farm, and there she noticed…her ring was gone.
She went back to search the fields but she knew it was pointless. She wasn’t even sure what rows she had picked on. Her friend felt terrible, but the baby was tired and sunburned, and the woman knew it was time to go home. She told the people up front.
“I don’t think Donn will buy me any more wedding rings,” she told her friend as they drove home from the berry farm. “And really, he shouldn’t. Perhaps I could have wedding earrings or a wedding bracelet instead!” Although that wouldn’t work. For one, you can’t sleep with jewelry. For two, you’d have to explain to people, and you wouldn’t bother. It’s not a universally-recognized symbol.
Later that afternoon, her husband and she went back to look, and they both agreed–it was hopeless. There was no way to find that ring! Her only chance was for someone honest to find it and turn it in. Days passed without a phone call though.
The following Saturday, she went again with the same friend to pick more berries. This was because the friend’s son, age 7, had been heartbroken that he didn’t get to go to the farm with his Aunty Elizabeth and pick berries, even though he categorically refuses to eat berries or pretty much any fruit or vegetable. She promised, so back they went on Saturday. “Please don’t wear ANY jewelry,” her friend told her. And later, “Maybe we will find it today!” “Maybe,” the woman agreed, but she really had no hope.
As they were leaving, she asked the guy behind the counter, “Any chance anyone turned in a wedding ring?” eyeing the discarded sunglasses and pacifiers lined up behind the cash register. “I don’t think so,” he said, and then…”Wait! Is this it?”
It was.
So…how long do you think she’ll be able to hold onto it this time?
Abel: my first class is Media as Lit.
Me: Does that mean you watch movies?
Abel: Yes. We’re watching the Batman/Dark Knight movies and a Star Trek. And some others that I forget.
Me: (hopefully) Maybe like a Shakespeare play?
Abel: I don’t think so.
Me: And how is this school? (mutters) It’s the end of the world. Or at least it should be.
Abel: (indignantly) No! It’s a good class. We watch movies and analyze them and compare them to classic books–
Me: –which you haven’t read, because instead you’re watching Batman movies…
Abel: no, he’s going to give us Spark Notes about the classics.
Me:
Me:
Me: Kill me now?
Happy New Year!
In my opinion, it’s still the Christmas/holiday season, not least because it’s still snowing on my blog. This should last at least through Monday when we all have to go back to school/work/normal life, and no I’m not looking forward to it at all. I really am feeling the need for another week off. I vote we all just take one. Right? This could work.
In honour of it still being basically Christmas, I think it’s time to unveil the 2013 Lego Creche. Long-term readers may remember that every year, Abel goes to his vast collection of legos and creates a nativity scene for me. I have recorded the results on my blog every year except last year. It all started our first year in Morocco, when he was 11 and most of his legos were in storage. The original Mary
may have messed with some people’s theology, although I have always felt that Mary was a woman just like us and that also possibly the line about “no crying he makes” might be a wee bit inaccurate. Although that year was somewhat barren, because of having relatively few legos, it still made a big impression. The following year included the wicked King Herod sending off his soldiers. And every year has a Roman patrol, which I feel should be included in traditional nativities because I’m sure there were lots of Roman soldiers patrolling the crowds. After all, a census was big business, and they wanted to get their hands on their share of the taxes. Here are years 2008, 2009, 2010. Although he made me creches in 2011 and 2012, apparently I didn’t blog about them. I photographed one year, but last year I didn’t even bother, because of how much I hated the phone-as-camera concept with all its limitations. No doubt you all thought, just because he’s all grown up now and the tallest in the family (which isn’t saying much. We tend to be a bit height-challenged), that he’d given up on legos. But no, he hasn’t, and I don’t think he ever will. He’s in drama at school, and it’s but a small step from designing lego creations to designing sets.
So, the 2013 version. (Aside: can you believe it’s 2014? remember when this date seemed comically distant?) This year might actually be my favorite in many ways. The attention to detail is terrific.
You can see the inn with the stable out back, set on a busy albeit narrow cobblestone street with the Roman patrol going by. (Why yes, I think he might have been influenced on this by growing up on Asterix and Obelix comics. I just thought of that) Note the detailing on the inn, the different coloured blocks, and the blocks of hay on the roof of the stable. Also the stable this year includes boxes for the horses and a couple of actual horses to boot.
I took the roof off the stable in order to get a good view inside. This year, Mary continues to be sleek and dressed all in black, with her hair in a becoming topknot. Joseph has been too busy to get to the salon, and he has also been spending more time in the sun which seems to have bleached his hair out.
Hey, can you tell I got a camera for Christmas? I did! It’s very cool, because I may have expressed my frustration with the camera phone once or a hundred times. It’s small and black and makes a very cool clicking noise and it does very cool close-ups of lego figurines.
Back to the creche. The inn is pretty full. There’s this guy round back…
and the place is full of people kicking back and relaxing on their way somewhere else…
and this guy…
As you go round the corner behind the inn heading to the stables, you will glimpse the 3 wise men presenting a treasure chest of, well, treasure. In this version, they all sort of went in together.
Why yes, Abel’s extensive lego collection does include a fair number of hobbits and lord of the rings.
We had planned a New Year’s Eve party, but then I came down with a fever and Ilsa was up all the night before with severe abdominal pain, which I googled sleepily on my phone at 5 a.m. before sending her back to bed to see if she got better in an hour or if I should make Donn get up and drive. She fell asleep and I succumbed again to the sweet siren spell of Nyquil and no one got up before 10. So it was pretty quiet round here. We did make it to midnight, and our annual playing of the U2 song.
Happy New Year! May 2014 bring you much joy.
Planet Nomad 