Patchwork Chapter 1

Carol J Pierce Colfer — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 14:37:30 GMT

Part 1: THE SECOND STORY

Chapter 1: My Office – Work, Pleasure and Family

This big old white house belonged in the early 1800s to Etna’s pastor. Its carriage house sits in the next lot to the east, no longer linked with ours; two small outbuildings grace our back yard, full of gardening equipment and firewood, respectively.

One of the two real bedrooms in this house of 3,000 square feet is now my study, the place where I read and think, write and edit. The walls are light blue, and an irregular ceiling accommodates the dormer, with its bank of three tall windows facing east. Through these windows before me are trees, now mainly green with some yellow leaves. Soon, they change from the green of summer to the yellows, oranges, browns of fall, and then in the stark and bitter winter to bare brown branches. In spring, the tiny new leaves appear on the old silver maple, closest to the windows --- long before there’s any hope of the outdoor warmth I crave. Behind me is a futon, set up as a sofa. I face a bookcase below the windows and two matching chests of drawers either side. My desk sits out from the dormer. A narrow staircase, curved at the bottom, leads down to the pub room.

In 2009, our hunt for a home almost concluded, this was one of the rooms in this house that attracted me. Its irregular ceiling, sloping each side of the dormer, reminded me of my teenage bedroom at my parents’ house in Portland, Oregon, part of a converted attic --- cramped but cozy. There, I had imagined myself inhabiting a garret, a poor Parisian artist’s studio, surrounded by painters and authors, embodying the worldly sophistication I aspired to. This daydream was reinforced on my 16^th birthday when, en route from a Swiss girls’ school to my grandparental home in Cyril, Oklahoma, I found myself alone in Paris with no money or food. Intent on proving my independence, I refused offers of both from a handsome French boy. I found the Louvre and admired the Mona Lisa; crossed the Seine on the bridge to the Île de la Cité and Notre Dame; wandered the Left Bank, imagining myself a beatnik, barefoot in the streets of Paris --- an adventure to remember.

Here in Etna, the dormer itself was another special delight, something I’d always admired in other people’s homes. Its three tall windows fill the room with light and give a lovely view of the trees and sunrise every morning.

Over these years, this room has been my haven. Here, I am surrounded by my books, by items I cherish, by the trees I love, visible through the windows; but more than these, this room is a place of solitude, a place where I can be most authentically myself. To write, to create, to do the research I love, I need solitude and quiet and some certainty of uninterrupted time. Here, I find it.

Now, I use this solitude and quiet to examine my surroundings, to capture memories hiding in objects, made visible by contemplation. I learn too about my aging self. Stimulated by the idea of truly ‘being in this place’ --- part of my yoga practice --- I began considering the objects that surround me; and discovered experiences I had forgotten, connections I’d never noticed in the memories that have come to mind.

Two Picture Frames

Straight ahead as I sit at my desk, I see, side by side, two pictures of my husband, one early in our relationship, the other more recent. In the latter, he is in his 70s, with grey hair and mustache, wearing glasses and almost smiling. A colorful Italian mosaic --- composed of flowers of red, orange and blue, each outlined in black on a white background --- frames his face. In the other, he is younger, in his 40s, with black hair and a dark brown mustache --- no glasses. His younger expression shows some resignation, perhaps that I am yet again taking his picture. It’s from a time earlier in our relationship, a stormier time. We married just before turning 40, both having been married before. This younger one sits in an oval brass frame that twirls too easily within a wider oval of twisted brass, set on a flat pedestal. Warm feelings flood my body, seeing these two iterations of my beloved --- available whenever I look up from my work.

The mosaic frame also reminds me of childhood visits to Naples --- where beautiful mosaics were abundant and inexpensive in the 1950s and 60s. When I was young, we lived in Turkey, and on three occasions we went home to the US by ship --- either the USS Constitution or the USS Independence (each a replica of the other). My maternal grandfather (born in the 1860s), to whose home we headed every two years, was particularly pleased when we went on the Constitution; it reminded him of the lovely sailing ship after which this modern vessel was named. We would begin this journey on a Turkish ship, much smaller, from Istanbul, through the Dardanelles and the stormy Aegean Sea to Naples, where we boarded the American ship. My father arranged these trips because he so passionately hated (and feared) air travel.

The brass frame I found at my mother’s house in Portland, Oregon only a few years ago. A picture of a young woman, her clothes and hairstyle suggesting the 1940s, graced the frame, but we couldn’t identify her. So my mother readily parted with the frame. The outer oval of rigid twisted brass and the twirling frame within seem out of place in modern times, somehow redolent of an earlier era. I replaced the stranger’s picture with my husband’s and imagine a long and colorful history for the frame; I admire my husband’s youthful face (though no more than his aged one). Our relationship is more tranquil these days.

A Yellow Quilt

A quilt covers the futon/sofa. Backed with white, its bright sunny yellow trim --- like butter --- forms a design called Dresden Plate. My great grandmother, Savanah Georgia Putnam Pierce, made this quilt top and many others during an adulthood spent in tiny Cyril, Oklahoma. She died before finishing this one. In the early 2000s, a group of women in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, organized by American evangelicals, were quilting as a money-making project; they finished it for me.

I love this quilt, because my great grandmother made it and because the rays of cloth in rings around the pattern’s center circles are made from remnants of fabrics used in her dresses. I can see her, in my mind’s eye, wearing these dark blue patterns, very small flowers or tiny designs scattered throughout. When I look at the quilt, I see her clearly. A tiny woman, about 4’10”, she had, in her old age, a pronounced humpback. She wore dresses to her ankles, always with long sleeves, decades out of style. She donned a bonnet when she went outside, not wanting her skin to darken in the sun. My mother, a psychologist, tested her IQ one time; Great Gramma did not do well. But that did not affect my love for her. She was always kind and affectionate with me and I loved her dearly, as did my father.

As the son of an unmarried woman, Dad had grown up with his mother and his grandparents in her parents’ tiny house; I visited every summer as a young child. The four rooms included the kitchen, two bedrooms and a living room, with outdoor plumbing. When we visited, I slept with my great grandmother, and we used a chamber pot at night, emptying it outside every morning. She had a ‘slop bucket’ in the kitchen where garbage was tossed; and at mealtimes we all gathered round the table while she brought over the food for us to eat. She almost always served hamburger patties, cornbread, beans and potatoes boiled to within an inch of their lives. We drank sugary sweet iced tea at every meal from big clunky goblets, with little indentations for our fingers. In summer, we feasted on corn on the cob, green beans, whatever was in season to add to these ‘staples’. Strawberries, watermelons, and peaches were abundantly available in season. My swing hung from a tree; and I would swing while eating its fruit, covered in peach juice, and tasting its incredible sweetness with every bite. Great Gramma fed about 40 outdoor cats every day out back, near their barn (where they kept an old black Model A Ford).

I loved being in her room, which was loaded with knickknacks. Her corner shelves were littered with tiny animals and figurines, some from Cracker Jack boxes, others made of ceramic or glass. Occasionally she would get them down for me to look at. On the wall, she had a barometer in which a boy or a girl (with sunhat or umbrella) came out respectively, depending on whether the atmospheric pressure was rising or falling. And Great Gramma’s sewing machine was operated with a treadle. There, she made the quilts, her dresses and occasionally clothes for me. She was entranced with the Dionne Quintuplets who had been born a decade or so earlier, their photos festooning her walls.

Great Gramma had some funny ideas. She thought that praying mantises were poisonous; that if a toad urinated on your hand, you would get warts; and when tornadoes came, as they often did in Oklahoma, she refused to accompany us through the slanted doorway, and down the rough steps to the cellar out in the yard. She’d say, ‘When my number’s up, my number’s up’; but she didn’t die in a tornado. She also refused to give up the $300 she’d saved for her burial, an act that would have rendered her eligible for monthly governmental income for life. She was protecting her independence, demonstrating her self-sufficiency, in her eyes (though she wound up totally dependent on her daughter).

When I look at her quilt, all these memories flood into my mind. I am back in that tiny house as a child, drinking her sweet tea, appreciating the hamburger patties and mushy potatoes, spitting the seeds out of watermelon, feeling the peach juice drip down my chin, the wind caressing my cheeks as I swing under the peach tree.

Sitting on the floor, doing a yoga twist and looking behind me, I see Great Gramma’s yellow quilt brightening this room. The tiny blue flowers of her dress fabric again transport me back to Cyril and my early childhood. I see her, with her humpback, walking slowly around her bedroom, then going from the kitchen sink to the table, bringing us all food, heading out to the barn to feed the cats. Once she made us laugh as she stood behind her husband sitting in the living room. Proving the deafness he denied, she said, “He can’t hear a word I’m saying”. Her quiet kindness and good heart fill me with warmth, as I remember her.

The Persian Carpets

When I do yoga --- essential for my aging body --- my mat lies on a wonderful, multicolored Persian carpet; and beside it, under my desk is another, woven of natural earth tones (browns, greys, whites, blacks) --- magic carpets. My former husband Michael and I got them in Iran in 1971. We’d expected to go to Turkey to conduct ethnographic research for our PhDs --- we both were reasonably conversant in Turkish ---but had been denied research permission. I wanted to study women’s status there and he, human ecology. Only at the last minute, before my Fulbright grant would expire, did we gain admittance to Iran instead, where only I had studied the language. We went north in Iran first, hoping to work with the Kurds, but encountered ubiquitous suspicions from the government and the people that we were CIA operatives. We concluded that doing anthropological research under those circumstances was too chancy. Then we thought to focus on the fisherfolk of the Caspian, one of Michael’s interests; but when we got to that area, there were virtually no fishing vessels. The sea was claimed by the Soviet Union. Eventually, we headed south, and found a receptive community of resettled Qashqa’i nomads. We had a couple of months with them before we both came down with hepatitis --- perhaps from Iran’s unhygienic conditions, perhaps from the gamma globulin shots we’d gotten in California before we left home.

But these lovely carpets remain as a reminder of that exciting youthful time when and where we learned so very much. When I see them, I admire first the brilliant colors of the one: Within a light brown background, maroon and orange flowers form a border; all sorts of creatures --- birds interspersed with others unidentifiable to me --- in reds, blues and oranges populate a large interior rectangle. Although the whole carpet is covered in designs, it manages somehow not to look cluttered; a bit like a life contained within a rectangular house, yet full of its inhabitant’s memories of interconnected experience.

The rug of natural colors is just as beautiful in a different way. Bordered by four concentric rectangles, the central designs appear as plants, with a few birds interspersed. Each carpet’s design is contained within a rectangle, with the orientation toward the center.

We found the carpets in a traditional bazaar in Shiraz, where we lived briefly. The bazaars were busy, vibrant places, with whole sections devoted to carpets from all over Iran; each district and ethnic group had its own style. Azzarita (2020) refers to Turkey and Persia as ‘the rug belt’. Ours remind me vividly of the family we lived with in the village of Dowlatabad --- before we fell ill --- close to Shiraz, nearer Persepolis (once the capital of the Achaemenid Empire).

The village, its houses made of mud brick, was inhabited by a group of nomadic Qashqa’i, who had been ‘resettled’ by the Shah, still in power at the time, his downfall still eight years away. Former pastoralists, they had learned in recent years to be wheat and poppy farmers. We lived that summer with the headman and his two wives, in a walled compound of several houses, a well, space for drying crops, spinning wool, weaving carpets, churning butter, as well as cooking, bathing, cleaning, entertaining, sleeping, laughing, crying --- all the other things people did to subsist and thrive.

Unlike urban Persian women, the women of Dowlatabad wore tribal dress: Multiple wildly colorful and fully gathered, long skirts, one on top of another, with an only slightly more reserved tunic, slit on the sides. The tunic reached to the knees and a brilliant gauzy headscarf covered their hair (as prescribed by Islam), often an iridescent translucent pink fringed with small gold- or silver-colored, plastic disks that caught the light, glittered in the sun and fluttered beautifully in the wind.

Even now, these carpets bring back wonderful nights, rarely duplicated. We slept on the ground on a veranda under a square mosquito net through which we could see the stars. Without urban light pollution, the nights were so perfectly clear that the sky above us became a brilliant panoply of scattered sparkles, larger and brighter than any I’ve seen elsewhere --- except possibly on a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

We woke to the sounds of cream sloshing back and forth as a daughter churned butter in a goat skin slung from a wooden tripod. The women spun their yarn by hand with a metal drop spindle, as they did other chores while preparing for winter’s weaving. The adult son of the household, in his mid-20s, would come home at dawn, having been awake all night, driving the harvester the village rented together, harvesting their own long thin strips of land.

Frightening events also come to mind. Once in Tehran our three-year-old daughter, Megan, ran around freely in a bazaar before we realized that there were open sewers (jubs) here and there. We could see the water rushing by under square openings in the concrete of the bazaar floor. She could easily have fallen into one and been lost forever. Similarly, in the village, the well was open and the fear that she might fall in plagued us. Another time a wild pig was glimpsed, and the men of the village tore out of the compound full of angry passion, determined to beat the poor creature to death --- an act of religious fervour we found frightening.

The beauty of both these carpets is a source of recurring delight though, as I routinely do my ‘downward dog’ or lie on the floor in yoga’s ‘cobra’ or ‘sphinx’, the colors and patterns right before my eyes. One day, bending toward my knee, with one leg straight to the side and one crooked, the blues and creams in this rug come close to my eyes. This image took me back to Isfahan’s palace. Isfahan was a beautiful city in the center of Iran, illuminated by the turquoise and gold domes of its many mosques. We went inside one opulent palace with a restaurant --- bedecked in turquoise tiles as well. Inside, Iran’s stunning heat was moderated by air conditioning and we savored the icy and delicious sharbat (شربت), the origin of what we call sherbet, in lovely small bowls.

The turquoise color that so dominates this Persian city (and is common through much Persian art) has come to symbolize the beauty of Iran for me. And the contrast between this delicate turquoise color and the more ‘solid’, cobalt blue so common in Turkish tiles strikes me. Both beautiful colors, both beautiful countries.

My next yoga pose, a ‘little tree’, brings to my eyes a reflection of myself in my son’s painting of Kalimantan on the wall. I see the diamond shape my raised arms make, with the namaste of my hands a longer point at the top. Inside is the globular reflection of my head --- rendering me beautiful in a way my old face and arms can no longer be in real life.

A Gold Colored Jewelry Box

This rectangular, gold colored box, visible under one of my bookcases, has four outward slanting legs covering some eight inches of floor space. Sitting about 6” off the ground at its highest point, roses and their leaves form ornate decorations, with a few swirls and simpler flowers cast into the metal. A solid, well-made item, the inside, top and bottom, are lined with pink satin. It belonged to my father’s mother, Gramma Vel. I thought it the most beautiful item in the world, when I was a child, never imagining I’d wind up its proud owner. Although my own tastes have changed markedly, still I love this box, as it brings my grandmother so vividly to mind. I feel her presence when I look at it and her doting attention.

Gramma Vel liked to spoil me. She would give me anything I wanted that was in her power to give. One time, when I was about eight, she let me eat a whole package of hotdogs (not really such a good idea). She and I would go hunting for four leaf clovers, which she believed were good luck (along with a rabbit’s foot she carried on a keychain). We could spend hours lying on the grass, hunting around among the clovers, checking the number of leaves on each. Shivering in Etna’s chilly summers, the fact that we were in warm Oklahoma at the time hits home. When I lived in Turkey, she’d send me records (45s) with the latest hit songs. Something my teenage soul truly longed for, these gifts soothed my feelings of homesickness and provided hours of happy listening, singing and dancing alone in my room.

I thought she was incredibly beautiful. In the 1950s, she kept her hair dyed black and maintained her slim figure; she wore translucent red blouses and brooches with plenty of rhinestones. She had a tattoo (of the US flag) on her upper right arm and loved what’s now called ‘bling’ --- though that word hadn’t, to my knowledge, been invented before she died in 1994. A middle-aged woman when I first knew her, she always looked spiffy. And I wanted to be like her rather than my mother, whom new acquaintances guessed was a librarian (bookish, glasses, no makeup). This jewelry box captures Gramma Vel’s traditional femininity, something I so valued as a child. I also considered the box of a royal nature, thus meshing well with my childhood longing to be a princess. Although as an adult I have been a strong, sometimes radical feminist, I have always also appreciated traditional feminine beauty.

Gramma Vel had a hard life: a rape that resulted in my father, later married twice, once to an alcoholic who died young, and then for a longer time to a man with few redeeming qualities who also predeceased her. Money was always short. She was a southern racist, through and through, and never seemed able to love my half Indonesian son as she loved me and my daughter. Nor could she really love my mother. Not a blood relative, she did not qualify, in Gramma Vel’s mind, to receive the same depth of love. But I can forgive these things. What I remember about her when I look at her jewelry box are her generosity, her beauty, the love she showered on me, my father, and my daughter.

A Gorilla

On one of the two matching chests of drawers sits a small, dark brown, roundish, stuffed gorilla. His eyes look to the side, and his nose is smudged from age. His fur is very soft, and holding him in my hands, as I can do because he’s so small, is like cuddling a baby. Cuddling the gorilla in this way, strangely, fills my heart with love.

He is not a reminder of my childhood; my father gave him to me about 30 years ago when I was far too old to be loving stuffed animals. But Dad and I shared a fascination for gorillas. Dad, like me an anthropologist, felt that he had a special genetic link with gorillas because of his prominent eyebrow bones (supraorbital ridges); he also believed --- or said he did anyway --- that these ridges linked him to Neanderthal. Oddly, he also considered his capacity to bear pain an indication of such kinship, though how he concluded Neanderthals were good at bearing pain remains a mystery. Anyway, I grew up thinking men were proud of links to Neanderthal, that they saw such links as evidence of their masculinity.

For my junior year in college, I got a scholarship to study Middle Eastern languages at Princeton. I was one of the nine girls allowed in experimentally in 1964. There were lots of ways that I didn’t fit in: I had lived a third of my life overseas and then out West for several years; I was a woman and a budding feminist in a traditionalist men’s school; I was the daughter of an Okie who disdained eastern elites; and I was very proud of my own democratic ideals. Princeton was a bastion of the elite East.

These differences sometimes got me in trouble. My boyfriend Mikey and I were having dinner at the Quadrangle Eating Club (as was our wont), chatting with one of his friends. I noticed the friend’s ridged eyebrows and commented admiringly on them, intending to compliment. To my surprise, he looked shocked and clearly displeased, though he said nothing. Subsequently Mikey berated me privately for insulting his friend! Neither of them had an anthropologist in their family, especially not one with unusual ideas about the qualities and desirability of prehistoric man.

My fascination with gorillas continues. Friends and colleagues at the Center for International Forestry Research, CIFOR, learned of this love of mine. Robert, a French friend, jokingly referred to me and another older, rather more difficult woman colleague, one day, as silverbacks --- a term applied to old male gorillas. Edmund, a younger French friend, was clearly shocked, seeing the term as insulting. He didn’t realize that I took it as a minor compliment --- evidence of my status as a progressively wiser older woman. Robert understood. A photograph of a proud silverback glares majestically at me from the southern wall of this office.

A Framed Picture Made by my Husband

This picture, rendered in childlike fashion, has green grass, about a third of a yellow sun rising over the horizon with yellow lines radiating outward as rays, against a blue sky. A dark bush and a potted plant, both with red berries, share the foreground. Across the grass in red, my husband hand printed “You are my Sunshine” for Valentine’s Day in 2015.

The cheery brightness of the simple design delights me, makes me feel loved. A scientist, he doesn’t think of himself as artistic; but his doodles are attractive, as are the beautiful leaves he learned to draw in biology classes. Another of his drawings graces my desk, under its glass.

The framed picture also reminds me of my daughter, perhaps not my husband’s intent. I used to sing Megan to sleep with that song and we both still associate it with a mother’s love. Singing the song brings tears to my eyes, as I remember times past, the different love one feels for a small helpless child than for an also-loved adult daughter. I see her sweet face, her closed eyes, her childish beauty, even feel the softness of her cheek. When she had her own children, she sang the same song to them, with the same outpouring of love, as my mother also sang it to me. The replication of our singing, one generation after another, touches me, binding us ever closer together. On my mother’s 100^th birthday, Megan’s daughter sang that song at the celebration.

Photographs on my Desk

On my desk, under glass right beside my computer, I’ve put one of my favorite pictures of my brother, who died in 2019. Although seeing his picture brings back the sadness of his death, it also soothes me. I can touch the top of his head and remember the fuzzy feeling of his shaved and nearly bald pate. I can touch his shoulders and feel his arms around me, saying our last in-person goodbye two months before he died. He was leaving Portland, where we were both visiting --- never imagining it would be our last moment together. In this picture, his shirt is blue denim, then he was wearing brown corduroy. I can feel the corduroy under his strong shoulders that curled around me, his smile matching the one in the picture. I feel his presence, by looking at his picture.

On the corner, right next to my brother, is a 2018 picture my husband took of my daughter Megan in her front yard, alongside her three teenagers in Everett, Washington. Megan has her arms around her daughters, as they stand, all in a row: Storm, Megan, Skye. My grandson Stone, taller, appears at the end of the line. It was a lovely summer day and Storm was practicing her backward rollovers in their front yard, as we all watched, enjoying the sunny weather and her obvious skill. Megan, blessed with a green thumb, was intermittently tending her beautiful, flourishing garden.

Seeing their picture --- knowing how far away they are --- evokes poignancy. My sadness at their absence is tempered by the pride I feel in Skye --- a slender tomboy and a scholar. I remember the thrill as she protected her team’s goal in a hockey game, or the reflected glory I felt when others commented admiringly on the tiny, speedy referee racing across the ice. I feel again my amazement seeing Storm --- a girly girl with musical inclinations --- doing perfect splits high in the air, or way above her cheer teammates, standing perfectly balanced on their upraised hands. I worry about Stone, a bright but sad gamer, now a pre-med college student. I want to be with them, to hear their joys and sorrows in person.

Bompie’s Chinese God and Fountain Pen

Two items here bring to mind my maternal grandfather (whom I called Bompie): a fountain pen and a statue of a Chinese god symbolizing long life, procured, surely, on one of his late-in-life, globe-trotting travels. Solid, though made of a light-colored, light weight wood, it stands about a foot in height. The god, nicely carved, has a beard, and an enormous bald cranium that glistens in the sunlight; he peers down benevolently at what may be a human skull, held in his left hand --- though Wikipedia says it may be a peach symbolizing immortality. He holds a staff in his right hand.

Bompie, a Congregational minister, lived to be 96, some of the credit for which may be attributable to this god. My mother, now 100, inherited the statue (only passing it on to me a few years ago) --- providing further evidence of an efficacious god, worthy of respect. Perhaps he will give me long life as well.

The old fashioned, orange and black fountain pen dips into an ink well. It sits in a smooth, black, square, plastic base. Bompie always had it on his desk, where he prepared his sermons, when I was a child. He also kept candy in his desk drawer and would give some to me (and to Max, his dog) when we meandered into his study. He was a preacher of progressive and intellectual tilt.

In his dotage, he came to live with my parents in Portland, and I sometimes took care of him. In the 1970s, during his ninth decade, we would argue about feminism. He would insist that women were naturally purer than men, that ‘men were the pitchers, women the catchers.’ My arguments were consistent, logical, passionate…and totally ineffective.

One of my more peculiar experiences with him occurred in the summer of 1971, when I was looking after him while my parents travelled. He wanted to arrange his own funeral and asked me to take him to several Portland funeral parlors for that purpose. I was in my 20s and somewhat taken aback by this request, though I readily agreed --- completely unprepared for what was to come. In each funeral parlor, he would ask the price of the different caskets, explaining that he didn’t want a ‘pauper’s casket’, but he did want the next cheapest one. Then once they’d given him a price, he’d begin to haggle, reminding them that he was a man of the cloth, that he should have a discount because of this. At the time, a welter of emotions --- surprise, shock, embarrassment, amusement --- vied for dominance.

Speak No Evil, See No Evil, Hear No Evil

On the central windowsill of my dormer, there sits a tiny white statue made of ivory. It is about an inch in height, on a black base. The statue is composed of three monkeys representing the ethical injunction to ‘Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil’. The monkey on the left covers his mouth with his hands; the one in the center covers his eyes; and the one on the right covers his ears. Although this statue is not the one Bompie owned --- his was a bit bigger and made of green jade --- its message is the same. The moral implications of these avoidances were explained to me as a child, and I accepted them as good advice.

Later in life, living in a village in Sumatra in the mid-1980s, I became close friends with Mike and Ann Wade, very good people. One day, Ann was explaining why she didn’t want her four small children to see a violent movie. Central to her thinking was the idea that we should protect our senses from the undesirable. Consistent with cognitive science at the time (and perhaps still?), she thought that once evil ideas or behaviours entered our brains, they never actually left, even if we forgot them consciously. So it was the better part of valour to avoid letting them in, in the first place --- a philosophy compatible with Bompie’s and my monkeys’.

Turkish Men Reading the Quran

To my right and left, on the matching chests of drawers, I see two similar dolls: both Turkish men, seated reading the Quran. The man on the left, pictured below, is bigger, younger --- his beard dark brown and curly. He wears a simple, heavy coat over a black vest, with thick grey slacks --- very like real rural Turkish men. He kneels before the Quran, which sits on a decorative stand like those used in mosques.

The man on my right is smaller, older, his head bent with age, his beard white, his attire like that of his younger ‘twin’. He holds the Quran in his hands, resting on his upraised knee. The fez --- which both wear --- was declared illegal by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the ‘father of modern Turkey’ and a man whom all Turks revered when my parents gave me these dolls (1950s). If news reports can be believed, this reverence no longer holds.

These dolls remind me of all the Islamic countries where I’ve lived: Turkey in the late 1950s and early 1960s; Iran in 1972, with Michael; between 1986 and 1990, Dudley and I were in the Sultanate of Oman, a country still run then by the autocratic but benign Sultan Qaboos. I lived much longer, about 25 years, in Indonesia, where a very different form of Islam was practiced. The government pretended to democracy much of the time I lived there, under President Soeharto. Elections were rigged and Soeharto ruled with an iron hand. Although the Islam of Indonesia and that of the Middle East differ greatly, there remains an ongoing balancing act in both regions between those who would run the country as an Islamic state and those who prefer a separation of religion and government. Since Islam prescribes that politics should be intimately integrated within religion, a see-saw of power (secular vs. religious) is common in Muslim countries.

I moved to Pekanbaru, Riau, in Sumatra, in 1991. There I learned that every Ramadan, Riau’s children participated in Quran reading competitions; they’d won the national competition in recent years. Fasting during the day, people stayed up late at night, feasting then instead. Whereas in Oman, we’d heard a gentle, melodious call to prayer five times a day, by an experienced and carefully selected Imam from a single distant mosque, in Pekanbaru the call to prayer became a cacophony of scratchy, loud, jarring, incomprehensible noise, with cheap electronic sound systems from each of five mosques near our home, all turned to maximum volume, each competing to drown out the others. The local children practiced their Quran reading every night aloud, aided by these electronic sound systems until after midnight. Then at 3 AM, the five sound systems would come to life again, waking people so they could prepare and imbibe their last food and drink before dawn, their last nourishment till dusk (a difficult fast in the tropical heat).

But sleep was impossible. The various ear coverings we tried were ineffective. A kind American family, hearing of our sleepless nights and about to go on leave, invited us to move into their house until Ramadan’s end. The Caltex compound was like an American suburb, with ranch style housing and cupboards full of mundane American items not available locally --- all ferried in by plane from Singapore and beyond. Although shocked by the degree to which this compound replicated America in miniature, we guiltily enjoyed these comforts of home as well as the nighttime quiet. Two very different worlds, side by side.

My Turkish religious figures remind me of the friendliness, hospitality and generosity my family and I received from Turks, Arabs, Persians, Qashqa’i and Indonesians, as we tried to learn about and adapt to their unfamiliar, yet so hospitable ways. Such a contrast to the adverse and violent stereotypes of Muslims that I encounter in my own country --- hatreds coming from pure ignorance.

1960s Leather Purse

On the floor, where it has no business being, is my big leather purse. It’s here because I still love it, can’t bear to part with it. I’ve been told to stop carrying big purses (filled to capacity), as the weight is bad for my painful aging hips. So…small purses now prevail. This purse, leather strips forming its wide sides, is closed with a unique bronze clasp. It holds both stuff and memories.

On my 65^th birthday, Dudley and I visited Ithaca’s Saturday Market. A leatherworker, whose accent identified him as a transplant from ‘the City’ (Brooklyn, we learned), was unusually entertaining. Disappointed in my hope to replicate a purse my mother had given me in the 1960s, he produced this one with the magnificent clasp. And Dudley bought it for me.

My mother’s 1960s gift I used for decades. She’d bought it at Portland’s Saturday Market --- another congregation of hippies, artists, and various creative individuals hawking their wares. The purse had two features I hoped to replicate: a snap just inside for a keyring, and a flap that was inserted into a strip of leather that had been magically braided from one piece, without free ends --- still a mystery. The purse had a somewhat checkered career, including a stay in West Kalimantan in the 1990s, where the humidity once covered it completely with green mold --- a problem that proved surprisingly easy to rectify.

My affection for leather purses comes partly from my father. Very patriotic, he’d enlisted during World War II and again for the Korean War in 1950. After the latter enlistment, conflicted between his felt patriotic duty to fight for his country and his abhorrence of killing, he was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown, in San Antonio, Texas. This stay though dragged on for months, long after he’d regained his equilibrium, due to a bureaucratic mix-up: The US Army had lost him. In the hospital, he was given ‘occupational therapy’ consisting of making elaborately tooled leather purses. I prefer the plainer aesthetics of the 1960s, but the purse on the floor reminds me of him and of our 1950s stay in San Antonio, where Mother, Gramma Vel and I made frequent visits to its famous zoo.

Books

Directly in front of me, below the three dormer windows, is a long, low bookcase, full to overflowing with books I use for work --- on anthropology, Indonesia, natural resources. One and a half shelves contain books with chapters I’ve written; toward the bottom are books on Indonesia; books on natural resources fill the remaining space.

They remind me of authors I’ve known, events I’ve experienced. I see a bright yellow one by Michael Dove, The Banana Tree at the Gate. Largely a historical treatise on Borneo, it brings to mind his other books: two fat grey volumes (his PhD dissertation), another on ‘development’ in Indonesia. I like what he writes.

We first met, in 1979, during my first week in Indonesia. Having heard that he was fresh from fieldwork in Borneo, and heading there myself, I was excited to meet him. In his Ford post-doc office in Yogyakarta, I found a tall, slim, intelligent, very good-looking guy …. who was married. Nothing came of that attraction, and my secret passion dissipated, leaving me with only a sweet affection and genuine gratitude for his field-savvy intro to life in Borneo. A few years ago, he invited me to give a lecture at Yale. I was touched and pleasantly surprised to hear his long and effusive introduction, to feel some reciprocation of my own warm feelings of appreciation and respect.

To my left, at the top of the ‘servants’ stairs’ is a narrow, five-shelf, more vertical bookcase, angling at the top toward the wall. On the very top shelf are books that have influenced me theoretically --- by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Arturo Escobar, Paulo Freire, Elinor Ostrom, Michel Foucault. The second and third shelves (right at eye level, so I can revel in them from time to time) are my own books, books I’ve written or edited.

Seeing them fills me with satisfaction and pride. They are the concrete evidence of the hours, weeks, months, years I’ve spent on research, analysis, writing, editing. Such activities have filled my life, and I’ve found challenge, excitement, creativity and satisfaction in them (along with some inevitable tedium).

I asked my father, when I was in grad school, how many publications he had (an indicator of academic success then as now). He professed ignorance; He really had no idea. At that time, when I looked forward so enthusiastically to publishing my work, I was shocked. Later in life, I came to understand. I too no longer know how many I’ve produced.

Behind me to my right is another, shorter, narrow, angled bookcase, this one of only three shelves. It’s full of literature on gender and health, two of my enduring fascinations. They reflect my passions --- at least the academic ones.

Now, on top of the low bookcase by the windows, sit books and articles on ‘adaptive collaborative management’ (ACM, a CIFOR program I led in the early 2000s) --- I am revisiting the approach we used, with my one-time team members, putting together two edited collections. In May 2020, I got the crazy idea to contact these team members, some ninety of them, to see if they’d like to work with me on a book about what they’d learned since those early days. What a thrill it was when twenty-two cared enough to send me abstracts of their ideas. Now we have both books finished.

Working on these books, affectionately called ACM-R1 & 2 (the R is for ‘revisited’), brought to mind the individuals who worked on that earlier program.[i] We earnestly believed we could strengthen villagers’ voices, bring about a deeper understanding of their cultural systems, and build on that together with them, with the approach we were taking. And often we could.

These co-workers became dear friends, though the years have scattered us. The internet has allowed us to reconnect with relative ease; and our communications in planning these books have sustained me, bringing back the excitement and hope of that project’s headiest days, as well as gratitude both that they wanted to work with me on these books and that so many of our community efforts continued.

Paperweights

I sit on the floor in sukhasana position (‘easy pose’), my head even with the desk’s surface. I see two beautiful globular paperweights from a new angle, this wintry morning. The sun’s rays strike them, giving their clear glass a luminescence not obvious in ordinary light --- only hinting at what lies within. Both their curving surfaces, set against the flat topography of the desk’s glass cover, intrigue me. Their curvy shapes suggest a softness that belies their hard fragility.

I made a trip to Santa Barbara, California a few years ago, staying with my sister-in-law Lynda, in her lovely home perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She was a bank president at the time, drove a silver Jaguar, and lived what my husband and I considered ‘the high life’. Despite our very different political views, we appreciated and enjoyed each other.

We went to a nearby artist’s co-op, where I fell in love with this beautiful blue paperweight. Within its globular clear glass is a blue being that reminds me of an octopus. Three strings of bubbles divide the tentacles, one from another. Variations in the blue coloring suggest movement, and a lighter shade of blue brings the underside to mind. It’s actually of course an abstraction ---an abstraction of inherent beauty and a reminder of a very pleasant afternoon with my sister-in-law.

It also brings to mind all the wondrous bodies of water I’ve lived near and on. In the 1970s, I lived in Seattle and later in Quilcene, situated on opposite shores of ever-chilly Puget Sound. Michael, Megan and I spent a frigid summer in 1977 sailing these waters in our sailboat, the Red Witch. My mother’s home in Portland straddles the Willamette River, which feeds the adjacent Columbia and flows directly into the wild and stormy North Pacific --- a thousand miles north of Lynda’s home and the warmer, quieter waters off Santa Barbara.

In the late 1980s, Dudley, Alan and I spent four years in an Omani ‘villa’ a couple of blocks from the Arabian Sea. There the waters were warm as bath water in summer, but lovely in winter. We could windsurf and sail and swim, ever-mindful of the deadly box jellyfish with whom we shared those waters. In the 1990s, my work trips to Cameroon took me to the oceanside town of Kribi, where I imagined (and missed) my homeland, linked by the Atlantic Ocean’s vast expanse, and where I grew to love Capitain, a delicious fish, fresh from the sea. In the 2000s, Dudley and I made several vacation trips to the Indonesian islands of Alor, between the Flores and Savu Seas. The winds blew gently, the waters were full of beautiful tropical fish, and we slept in a rude cabin a few feet from the waves that lapped the shore. My lovely glass octopus brings all these images to mind.

A second paperweight is also a clear globule, more egg-shaped than the octopus. Three white ‘blossoms’ have red spots of varying shapes and sizes. I remembered it as coming from Venice, where I spent a few marvelous days as a young teenager, utterly enamoured of the place. My parents, my brother and I wandered the streets, rode in a gondola, toured St. Mark’s Basilica and Square, and admired and bought some of the city’s famous beads and glassware. I have some of the beads my mother bought then and recently gave to me --- an early harbinger of my later love of beads and beading.

As I considered these memories, I absentmindedly turned the paperweight over to look at its base. There inscribed were the words, “Made in Japan”. So much for the fidelity of memory! There’s a perhaps inevitable layer of unreliability to the onion-skin of memory…How many other memories are factually incorrect? And does it matter? Our memories, whether accurate or not, can give us pleasure and reinforce our connections to other people, other places, our own histories.

A Wooden Doll Bed

An old oak doll bed,18” long with 12” bedposts, peeks out at me from behind the door to my right, as I look south into the upstairs hallway. It has been there, on my floor --- moved from the Hobby Room three years ago when we had that room remodeled --- a testament to our domestic untidiness.

Still, it brings happy thoughts to mind. I was allowed to play with the doll bed as a child, as was Megan. We both loved dolls passionately. Mother might also bring out her set of 24 ceramic dolls, then and now kept in a shoe box, each about 2” in height, with rigid appendages. A preacher’s daughter, she’d had few toys. Just imagining their fully clothed, white bodies, I see too the tiny naked, hard plastic baby dolls I had as a child. Was it my maternal grandmother, aka Ronnie, who’d painted underpants on these baby dolls with red fingernail polish, considering their nudity improper? Or was it Gramma Vel’s deed, as my mother believes? Given the aforementioned unreliability of memory, who’s to say who’s right? When my mother noticed my daughter’s nude dolls years later though, she expressed the same discomfort --- to my surprise and amusement. In our younger years, she’d considered nudity ‘natural’, that one needn’t worry about physical modesty --- a principle she still follows for herself, wandering nude from her bedroom to the bathroom, changing clothes with her door open, etc. Megan’s nude dolls were not given panties.

On the doll bed sits a tiny (15”x15”) quilt of light green, with a circular pattern of concentric circles, each composed of many small hexagons, made perhaps by Ronnie. She was a loving, but much sterner form of grandmother than Gramma Vel. Righteous, proper, Ronnie was also intellectually curious and very well informed about botany (despite having been pulled from school by her parents in 8^th grade). But a closer look at the quilt suggests that it too may have come from my great grandmother Savannah. The fabrics, like those in the yellow quilt described earlier, remind me of her clothing.

In a jumble on this little bed are my father’s and my baby clothing and doll clothes, as well as a small, dilapidated doll’s trunk. Inside the trunk are more doll clothes, including crocheted dresses, tiny hangers, and other miniscule paraphernalia from the 1950s. I spent many happy hours dressing and undressing my dolls in this attire that my indulgent Gramma Vel had made for me. She seemed to want nothing more than to delight me.

The items from my mother --- the bed and the trunk --- bring to mind a different emotional profile. My mother was loving, but not a spoiler, not at all. I had to earn her approval. When I did, at a very young age, I might be allowed to play with some of her delicate belongings. A special treat was playing with her bracelet from which hung many tiny glass elephants, each a different color. I could only handle these on soft surfaces, when in a quiet and docile mood, and after demonstrating good behaviour.

In December 2020, Mother showed me on Zoom some jewelry she was prepared to part with ---in her ongoing effort to simplify, to reduce household clutter. I got first choice before she offered them to my daughter. One, to my surprise and delight, was this bracelet, not seen for decades. I expected to bring it home next time I traveled to Portland, but by then Mom could not find it. Her mind, centenarian in status, slowly deteriorating….

A Watercolor Painting

My son, Alan, is an artist. One of his paintings hangs on the wall behind me. Its colors are light greens and browns, and it portrays a river in Borneo ---perhaps the Telen in central Borneo near Long Segar, or possibly the Jembayan in Long Anai, closer to the coast and closer to his heart. The raging tropical rains are pouring down, realistically rendering the green shore fuzzy, like an impressionist painting, and the wide river runs as muddy as ever.

Seeing this image, I am back in time. I feel my bare feet on the notched log that linked the shore to the raft in the river where we bathed every afternoon. When the river was in flood, the log lay nearly level. At low water, more frequent, the log dropped precipitously to a seriously acute angle from the shore. I was better at balancing in my 30s than I am now, but the trip down could still be scary. My friends would caution, ‘Ayen laboq’, don’t fall, further raising my barely disguised anxiety, adding embarrassment to potential injury. The Kenyah, with long experience, could race up and down, even burdened with heavy loads, without apparent misgivings. Only the aged took great care.

Then, I see my younger self in March 1980 sitting high above the Telen, under a rough shed beneath a cluster of coconut trees, looking downriver. I often relaxed there after my afternoon bath, cooled from the water, out of the sun. I’m waiting for the arrival of my daughter and her father, whom I’ve learned are on their way --- somewhere between Seattle and Long Segar. I haven’t seen her for nine long months, full of longing. I’ve also looked forward ambivalently to seeing my husband. I’ve become romantically involved with my field assistant, and do not know how I will manage these two men, or even which I will choose.

The day my daughter arrived, I was sitting beneath the shed in the cool of late afternoon, wondering where they could be. My lover --- later, my son’s father --- came to tell me someone had seen two white people, a man and a child, in a riverboat, just beyond the curve in the river. I raced down the village path to the landing, hope strong in my heart (who else could it be?). And there they were. Joyfully, I took my lovely, skinny, 11-year-old Megan in my arms. I was also happy to see Michael --- ambivalence set aside for that moment. What a wondrous gift! I can relive this moment of maternal ecstasy --- relief, joy, the physical certainty that she was really there as I held her in my arms --- simply by glancing at my son’s painting. The painting is also a daily reminder of one of the most exciting times of my life. Another lovely gift.

As I take the ‘river’ pose, on my office floor, another image comes to mind. On the banks of the Telen, upriver from Long Segar, lies a named group of swidden fields, Baran Muyut. Baran is a tree (Euphoria) with lovely white bark and always-green foliage; and Muyut refers to its steeply angled position, jutting out over the river. It is the landmark and the end-point of the winding, cassava-lined path that led to swiddens I often visited…the land now covered in rigidly spaced, symmetrical rows of company-owned oil palm rather than the natural and appealing chaos of the Kenyah’s individually owned rice fields and gardens.

A Shell Picture Frame

Marvin Montefrio, a bright Filipino graduate student on whose committee I served in the mid-2010s, gave me this 8”x12” frame. Made of small squares of shell that glisten delicately in the light, it was a thank you gift when he graduated. A very pleasant, interesting young man, Marvin’s work was excellent. His research was in the Philippine islands of Palawan in the South China Sea, a setting I’d known both from pleasures and from work. I’d gone there twice with Dudley in the late 1990s, when we chartered a sailboat and sailed around the northern part of the archipelago; I’d also gone twice to supervise a CIFOR research site in the early 2000s.

These islands are idyllic: warm bays, dotted with dramatic limestone formations, provided safe anchorages. The seas were calm enough for easy sailing, lovely fresh mangos delighted the palate. We were piloted by a funny, heavyset Dutchman with many adventures to relate, and every evening we looked forward to more delicious food cooked by his Filipina wife. Though done with sailing myself, I still loved being on a boat, feeling the wind on my skin, seeing the lovely sights, dipping at will into the water to cool off. I can feel Palawan’s cool breezes, glancing at Marvin’s frame.

The frame now holds a picture of my son Alan and his beautiful Indonesian-American wife, Thearza (known as Tre). The photo was taken in Portland, on the day he asked her to marry him (in 2013). They both look dreamy-eyed and happy, leaning their heads together, facing the camera. I was so happy they’d found each other, as they both had similarly odd international backgrounds.. I’d worried Alan would have trouble finding someone with enough commonality of experience for mutual understanding and good communication. Both had long periods in Indonesia and the US, not exactly fitting in to either but comfortable in both. It seemed a ‘match made in heaven.’ And there they sit on my desk, reminding me of my love for them both as well as of our own crazy lives.

Two Framed Embroideries

Two embroideries grace my walls, one to the left and one to the right. The stitchery on my left (atop the narrow stairs) was made by my mother, not known for her domesticity. Indeed, I can’t think of anything else I’ve known her to embroider in my whole long life. But she embroidered two pictures with the same poem, enclosed in a border of pink, purple and yellow flowers --- one for me and one for herself. It says:

I still find each day too short

For all the thoughts I want to think,

All the walks I want to take,

All the books I want to read,

And all the friends I want to see.

These words capture her zest (even greed!) for life. At 100, she still wants to do more, see more, think more; and is frustrated by her inabilities related to aging and the restrictions imposed in recent years by the pandemic. Her active social life, which she managed with great effort to sustain even after she gave up driving, has dwindled to meetings on Zoom (a poor substitute, though better than nothing, in her eyes). She has a capacity to adapt, and with good humour, that I hope I can replicate if I live anywhere near as long as she has.

This same poem hangs in her bedroom, as it did when my father was dying of stomach cancer in March 1994. Mom and I were both with him when he died, and she was certain that he was looking at that picture, reading the words. I don’t know if he was. Perhaps he was focused on the pain he was feeling, despite the quantities of morphine I had given him (encouraged under Oregon’s Hospice program). Although most of my thoughts related to this embroidery are pleasant, focused on its meaning, other more bittersweet thoughts intrude. Sad thoughts are also part of life. Sorrow comes where joy has been lost.

The other embroidery, on the right wall, is simpler. It has a brown background with white lettering in a small oval frame; it simply says ‘Selamat datang’ (‘Welcome’ in Indonesian). My friend, Judy Gill, made it for me when we both lived in the village of Piruko in West Sumatra between 1983 and 1986. She was accompanying her husband, a soil science grad student at North Carolina State University and I was the team leader. Judy and her husband had been raised by New Tribes missionaries, in Bolivia, and held very conservative social values, unlike the rest of the team.

In the early years, I’d had my Javanese neighbour and maid, Larni, taking care of my son while I worked. However, after a year, I realized that this was not such a great idea. Larni felt that, as the boss’s child, all his desires should be accommodated, including as much candy as he wanted. When we went home for leave in 1984, we found cavities in almost all his baby teeth! So, when we got back, I arranged for Judy to babysit.

Judy certainly didn’t let him do whatever he wanted. Indeed, one time, she washed his mouth out with soap for saying some mildly naughty word. I worried that she might use the fear of Hell to encourage him to behave; and spank him, as her husband spanked their three small boys routinely. When I expressed my concern, she agreed readily enough to comply with my wishes, and Alan continued to enjoy his time with her and her sons.

Judy’s embroidery elicits so many deep and cherished memories of those years. We were five families of American scientists, four of whom were scattered throughout the tiny Javanese community of Piruko, working on a soil management project. All found the ideas labelled ‘farming systems research and development’ potentially revolutionary; all were trying our very best to put them into practice. We managed to overcome the usual interdisciplinary disagreements, all able, willing and excited to work with local farmers to come up with solutions to the problems we identified together. Our spouses, whose backgrounds included nutrition, social work, nursing, and fisheries, willingly contributed as well.

These shared goals and agreement about how to go forward led to an unusual level of camaraderie that extended into our private lives. As we coped with the difficulties of life in a remote Sumatran village --- lack of privacy, muddy impassable roads, bureaucratic hassles, and more --- we relied on each other for help, encouragement, support of various kinds. Trust and mutual appreciation developed and grew.

Besides the satisfaction of shared work and accomplishment, we enjoyed our leisure together. There were few external entertainments (only an occasional Javanese puppet show, wayang kulit, for a circumcision or wedding); so, we made up our own, dressing up in costumes for Halloween, arranging silly games for Valentine’s Day at Dan and Judy’s, putting on a variety show for ourselves on Father’s Day, playing basketball on the rice drying floor at Mike and Ann’s --- and of course marrying Dudley in my own house!

The friendships thus forged were strengthened further as we endured external threat. One of our team members, Mike, was unjustly accused of engaging in Christian missionary activity in this staunchly Muslim Province. Although we all defended him, again and again, from local to international levels, he was eventually expelled from the country --- marking one of the most unjust events I have myself experienced.

Thoughts of these people though tug at my heart strings, reminding me of how dear they are to me, how much we shared and accomplished, what a pleasure it was to work with them and to be in their company.

A Caricature of Myself

When I was leaving Bogor for a sabbatical in the US in 2002, my colleagues ordered a large (20”x24”) caricature drawn of me --- for a going away present. It sits on one of my bookcases, reminding me of well-loved colleagues and another professional experience I cherish.

The caricature shows my curly hair, with a white streak in what was then still mostly dark hair. My dangly earrings symbolized what we called ‘the worm’ in our work --- a series of interconnected circles (like a spring) symbolizing an iterative learning cycle, which we tried to emulate in our collaborative fieldwork. In the caricature, I’m wearing a familiar brown batik dress with big sleeves, in my arms a pile of papers falling out, flying around my feet. On the flying papers are our program’s favorite phrases: PAR (participatory action research), PAS (performance appraisal system), Gender, C&I (Criteria and Indicators of Sustainable Forest Management), and in the largest letters of all, ACM (Adaptive Collaborative Management of Forests).

I remember the close-knit team members, now spread all over the world. I led this team most intensely between 1998 and 2002. We had a coordinating group in Bogor and other teams in each of eleven tropical countries. I still feel pride remembering my own struggles to encourage enthusiastic buy-in from team members, sharing planning documents, asking for and listening to feedback, and developing a program that the members could commit to. I strove for democratic decision-making, trying also to encourage that approach as team members dealt with communities. We struggled together also to convince our ‘betters’ of the value of what we were trying to do, further strengthening the commitments and relationships among us. Strong bonds were formed…many endure.

These are the folks I contacted in May 2020, to ask if they might like to share what they’d learned these last twenty years in our new books, ‘ACM-R 1 and 2’. I still hope our insights may improve the many purely technological approaches so loved in international development circles. Tentacles of memory reach backwards and forwards, linking us to what’s gone before, moving ahead to forge new memories and accomplishments together.

An Omani Scene

The striking contrasts between Indonesia and Oman required enormous adjustments when we first arrived in Muscat in 1986. The climate was wet and humid in Indonesia, hot and dry in Oman. Whereas in Indonesia, the first answer to any bureaucratic question was ‘yes’, in Oman, the first answer was always ‘no’ --- though neither was necessarily the real answer. In Indonesia, rural neighbour women felt free to peer through our kitchen window and ask my husband what he was cooking or even into our bedroom to see if we’d like to buy some fish. In urban Oman, fences surrounded homes and home life was utterly private (in protection of women). Indonesian women wandered freely, selling all kinds of subsistence goods, working in fields. Omani women’s actions were far more constrained; men were observably uncomfortable dealing with women in public.

Despite my long experience in the Middle East --- by then, I had experience with Turks, Persians, and Qashqa’i, all Middle Easterners, all Muslim --- I soon learned that just as each group differed from the other, they also differed from Omani Arabs. Learning about, growing to understand such differences, as anthropologists do, is one thing; learning to live with them is another. I often struggled with the feeling that I should understand, tolerate, even appreciate cultural difference at times when in fact I found a value or behaviour objectionable, unjust, or unwelcome.

On the other side of the closet door in my office, opposite the ‘silverback’ and a raging wildcat wearing a pussy hat, is a painting from Oman. The scene shows a rock-filled wadi (a valley, وَادِي), with a steep stony side, and a young mountain range in the background. A few trees, more in fact than were usually present in the arid Omani countryside, add color to the image. The dark blue matting nicely complements the shadows, the lavender mountain range, and the light blue wall on which it hangs.

Wadis like this are as common as the vivid colors of women’s satiny pantaloons, tunics and diaphanous head scarves; the men’s long white cotton ‘dresses’ (dishdashes, دِشْدَاشَة) in the city, topped with headgear of subtler colors (tans, creams, greys), beautifully embroidered around the edges and cleverly twisted to stay solidly on men’s heads. In the villages, the men, like the women, wore pantaloons of less brilliant colors.

Longing to study women’s lives, I arranged to stay weekends with Tayiba’s family in the mountainous village of Fanja, a community intersected by wadis like those in the painting. Tayiba was a lively, delightful, progressive young woman, working as a health aide in the village clinic, striving to co-exist in a repressive context where young women were under-valued, their lives tightly controlled. Her hopes to go to university had been dashed by some --- to me --- minor infraction related to men, which ruined her reputation.

But Tayiba lived in a loving family. At 21, she was the eldest of ten. At home, she helped her mother with the youngest babies and a grandmother who had suffered a serious stroke. Water was brought from falaj (irrigation channels, فَلَج), running through the village, clothes were washed by hand in the falaj, few technological devices eased women’s work loads. One of my first and most recurrent Arabic phrases from women was: Ana ta’aban (أنا تعبان ), I’m tired. Studying birthing, I was usually with women, but at Tayiba’s home, I could witness family dynamics.

Once, sitting on the ground, around a platter of rice and lamb at dinner time, the family seemed to be engaged in an argument. Voices were loud, diverse opinions obviously being expressed (though I couldn’t follow all the vocabulary). Later, I asked Tayiba what they were arguing about. She smiled sweetly, surprised, and said, “Oh, we weren’t arguing. We were just deciding what to do with our goat.” Opinions were expressed more vociferously among these Arabs than in Indonesia or much of the US.

On another day, an English woman friend, Charlotte, took me to a village where she was teaching the women new weaving techniques. We drove her Landrover through the hot, dusty countryside, wadi after wadi, getting into ever more mountainous terrain, the road quality deteriorating kilometer by kilometer. I began to wonder just how far we were going and how bad the road was going to get?

When we finally arrived at our destination, we climbed a steep hill – rather like some of those in the painting. Atop the hill, the women (with Charlotte’s help) had covered a large area --- perhaps the size of a basketball court --- in a rectangle of black netting, and they had set up their looms under this canopy. From within the netting, we were comparatively cool. A glance in any direction brought the dramatically rocky, arid, mountainous view to our eyes. It was spectacular! What a wondrous, inspiring place to work. I was utterly delighted and…envious --- I’m unlikely ever to forget that day or that striking scene.

In the closet, beside this painting, I find the small square weaving I bought that day: yellow, white and green animals, birds, foliage and a person woven on a brown background, with black tassels on each corner. One more reminder of a lovely, memorable day.

Another time, Dudley, Alan and I went camping near the edge of another deep wadi, reminiscent of the Grand Canyon in the US. Indeed, it seemed bottomless. Approaching the edge inspired spine-chilling fear in me. And a short way down the cliff, we could see an inhabited cave. People lived there, raising their many small children, on the edge of this cliff that seemed to extend to the very bowels of the earth. No fence protected the inhabitants from a disastrous, inadvertent misstep. When I remember that day, I still shudder with fear, imagining their toddlers, or one of my own, falling over that ledge. People’s attitudes toward safety and danger vary enormously….

A 2020 Calendar

If I glance to my right, visible in the open closet, there hangs a colorful 2020 wall calendar. It was created by my cousin Kim. The calendar identifies the birthdays and anniversaries of each family member, with a photograph of the relevant individual(s). I was soothed by this calendar as the COVID epidemic kept our close-knit family physically apart.

After I came back to the US in 2009, I would go to the West Coast three or four times a year, to look after my mother, to see my children and grandchildren, and until 2019, my brother. Most of my cousins also live near Portland. But when I returned to Etna at the end of February 2020, after my brother’s death, COVID had just been identified, and it marked the beginning of a long separation.

My beloved uncle Dean died that September, and I could not go to his ‘celebration of life’. We made do with a Zoom ceremony, but it was not the same. His granddaughter married a few days later. Again, without us. Then we looked ahead to Thanksgiving, to Christmas, the times we would most likely gather. The holidays came and went. Beforehand, I imagined how we would suffer, the loss we would feel --- and then I felt it, though not as devastatingly as I’d feared. Zoom and FaceTime helped.

The calendar gives me a tangible and year-long reminder of the cohesive family to which I belong. Kim, Dean’s daughter, whose home is an hour south of Portland, looks in on my mother; and, in mid-September 2020, she took in both my mother and son, when wildfires to the east and south filled Portland’s air with noxious smoke --- a real danger to these asthma-sufferers. Then in June 2021, when the temperature rose to 117°F one day in Portland, Kim’s sister, Marie, took them in, giving my vulnerable mother access to air conditioning, critical protection from the heat.

Meanwhile, my son lives with my mother, looking after her, cooking for her, managing the house for her. Separated from his wife in Bali, because of both the epidemic and their work, he’s taken on this daunting task with equanimity --- so vital for my mother and for my own peace of mind. He’s doing a job I expected to do myself --- but could not because of the dangers of air travel with COVID, my mother’s susceptibility, the vulnerability of my husband (with heart trouble) and even my own, due to age.

How does one convey the gratitude one feels for the sacrifices one loved one makes for another? Sickness, RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus), struck the Portland household when we expected to gather for Christmas in 2021. My cousins, spread all over the US, provided Alan and me with extra funds to order foods in, brought an oxygen machine to help my mother breathe, a teapot and cooked food for us all to eat. How can one calculate or even express the value of such care? It clothes us in security and love when we most need it.

A Korean Kerchief

Beside the calendar, there hangs an 18”x18” kerchief from Seoul, Korea. On a dark green background are printed the most common tree leaves of Korea. Many are familiar to me --- ash, maple, oak, redwood; but even those I do not know remind me of how central trees have been in my life.

I’d gone to Seoul in 2010 for a meeting of IUFRO (International Union of Forestry Research Organizations), very much a men’s organization by long tradition. IUFRO and the host countries typically distribute ‘favors’ like the kerchief to participants. I’d ‘retired’ from CIFOR in 2009, from a job that had included international travel every month for decades. At that point, I was tired of travelling --- going from one fancy hotel to another, in one country after another. I rarely had time to leave the international world and feel the country I was visiting or meet the people in the more informal circumstances I preferred.

But this time, I’d been home for months and hadn’t seen my colleagues for over a year. Korea was new to me too, so I felt the excitement of seeing a new world. Moderating the first all-women panel that IUFRO had ever organized, I was excited, feeling that we were breaking new ground.

But more vivid than the meeting itself (or the incredible modernity of Seoul) is the evening of August 27^th, my 65^th birthday. No one there knew it was my birthday, and I was alone in the hotel bar, about to drown my loneliness and some degree of self-pity in an alcoholic drink, when I looked up, and saw Gun Lidestav heading toward me. She and I had become friends on IUFRO’s Gender Task Force and at her university in Umea, Sweden in 2004 when I’d helped her with a class. She sat down and proceeded to entertain me, to buy me a drink, to laugh with me. We celebrated my 65^th birthday in a manner I thoroughly enjoyed – a sad occasion morphed into a very pleasant one as our friendship deepened.

My Personal Journals

Further over in the closet, a bit hidden under the slanting roof, is a bookshelf, on which are crammed decades of my personal journals. The journals take many forms, from college essay books, to elegant, once-empty books designed for diaries, to the more recent, simply bound copies of my computer-generated scribblings. I began writing early: the first volume dates from 1955, the latest, 2023. For decades, I wrote in my journals, sometime erratically, by hand. With mild regret, I switched at some point, to the computer, a more efficient and legible way to write. But I regret the loss of the beauty and inspiration I got from my lovely empty books.

While still in Bogor in 2009, I worried I would experience a period of serious culture shock when we returned to the US. I’d lived in Indonesia for decades and I’d worked full time almost all my adult life. How would I adapt to such a radical change of locale and activity? I began writing religiously every morning, recording my observations, my emotions, my impressions. I wanted to capture what I loved of my work and my residence; and I wanted to keep attuned to my emotions in this new context. I found this self-therapy so satisfying I continue it now. Writing keeps me sane.[ii]

A Polar Bear

Looking North, above the ‘servants’ stairs’ is an old window consisting of 24 small square panes, once looking out to the backyard, but now looking into a beautiful sunroom that was added a decade before we took up residence.

Atop the lower window sits a simple, beautifully curved, stylistic statue of a polar bear, standing about 3” high. His white body is hollow and made of pottery. The line from his nose across his curved back and down his legs forms three quarters of an oval. Delicately etched on his sides are a variety of First Nation traditional images, visible only on close inspection. A colleague, Maureen Reed, had invited me to participate as an external examiner for her Ugandan student at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. I knew nothing about Saskatoon, but I found the name utterly exotic, and I was unusually excited to go there. Even getting there proved an adventure. I hadn’t realized just how far north and west I’d be going in Canada.

Maureen and her student, Felicitas Egunyu, entertained me lavishly. One outing was to a museum of First Nation cultures, including the Cree --- one of the groups my father had studied in the 1950s, as a linguistics grad student at Indiana University. We saw material culture that I remembered from that period, most memorably a full-sized wigwam; I was introduced to saskatoon berries; and I found this lovely polar bear. The polar bear calls up the warmth of my reception, the intellectual stimulation of Felicitas’ PhD exam[iii] and the adventure of seeing a new part of Canada.

This polar bear also stirs memories of a vivacious and brilliant onetime colleague, Mandy Haggith, whom we had invited in the late 1990s to CIFOR in Bogor to teach us about computer modelling for our ACM program. Mandy had long, wild, straw-colored hair --- soft, curly and golden --- a ready smile and a quick wit. She came with us for fieldwork in Jambi, Indonesia, in Gokwe, Zimbabwe and elsewhere around the world. Since then, she has left modeling behind and become a poet and a novelist, residing in her Scottish homeland.[iv] Polar bears have been one of her passions for years --- so this one also reminds me of her. I feel her ready smile and vibrant personality, wishing to see her again.

Kokeshi Dolls

On the other end of my window frame sit two Japanese kokeshi dolls obtained when I visited my parents in Kobe in 1967. My father had a scholarship to teach English as a second language that year in nearby Osaka. Michael and I were invited for Christmas, during our first, painful year of grad school at the University of Washington. UW and its Anthro Department were huge and we both suffered from culture shock, coming from cozy, intimate Portland State, with its accessible profs. We felt ignored, overlooked, and deeply disappointed that grad school was not turning out to be the exciting intellectual adventure we’d envisioned.

My image of Japan was dominated by my childhood experience of its cheap and shoddy post-war goods – toys Japan had exported in my childhood. Japan itself elicited no enthusiasm, though I looked forward to the travel and seeing my family. However, experiencing the country completely altered my perceptions. Its beauty and diversity --- mountains forested and snow covered, architectural wonders, improbable foods, fascinating cultural tidbits --- surprised and amazed me, as did the welcome we received from my parents’ friends and the excellent quality of Japanese products (both practical and artistic). I’ve always loved the insights and understandings that new places inevitably bring. The dramatic difference between my expectation and this Japanese reality proved jarring, but welcome.

Kokeshi dolls are simple, made of wood, with round heads and elongated nearly tubular bodies. Any features or attire are painted onto these simple forms. The two on my window represent an old man wearing a hat, with a cone-shaped white beard and a wooden cane; and an old woman, slightly shorter. Both have white hair and kimonos painted subtly on their simple wooden bodies. Throughout my life, I’ve been fascinated by old age. Although I have other kokeshi dolls, these are my favorites --- perhaps they have become even dearer now that I have reached an advanced age myself.

A Teak Chair

In the middle of a sukhasana, easy pose, on the floor, I see this chair over to my right. The sun is shining on and deepening the colors of the warm, dark brown teak. It takes me back to June 2009, just before we left Indonesia. The majesty of tropical woods, the beauty of Indonesian woodwork and our future need for furniture struck us, prompting a spurt of mildly frenetic furniture shopping.

In our hunt, we came across piece after piece of exquisite beauty, reminding me of my years of work in dense, majestic forests and of the inequities that mar human relations there --- the extreme poverty alongside the wealth. American loggers whose sense of their own manhood --- and their subsistence --- was linked with cutting down age-old trees in the 1970s. Javanese people living in teak houses, yet so poor they couldn’t afford a penny popsicle in 1980. Kenyah Dayak swiddeners adapting to the conversion of the rich tropical forest of 1979 to a landscape of oil palm by 2019 --- few of these folks reaped the rewards of the rich forests in which they lived. Nor have the forests themselves prospered. Worrying thoughts that do not mesh well with yoga and the sukhasana…

A large postcard

The temperatures have moderated, there are hints of green on branches, one or two daffodils blooming in the yard, birds tweeting up a storm. During the Zoom yoga class I just finished, I noticed this postcard that I’d put up recently on the folding closet door. It advertised an exhibit of medieval Islamic coins, organized by Gary Leiser, a fellow student at Portland State’s Middle East Studies Center in the 1960s.

The postcard is black, with a dramatic gold coin covering a quarter of the space. ‘Gold Caliphs’ is written in English and below, in Arabic --- both also in lovely, artistic gold lettering. Once I was engrossed in the civilizations of the Middle East. In grad school, we still differentiated cultures as: primitive, civilized, and modern, with the Middle East in the ‘civilized’ category. It had centuries of the written word, philosophies, monotheism, artistry galore, wealth. Unlike the ‘primitive’ forest worlds where I’ve worked, the Middle East had museums full of items of beauty and value (gold and silver and precious metals; paintings and sculptures), architectural wonders to boggle the mind (mosques and bazaars and palaces and caravanserais), millennia of written history to marvel at. Although even then my own passions were focused on ‘peasants’, the poor, the rural folk who lived adjacent to such splendour. Still, I can appreciate the glory of the Middle East and its civilizations.

My Computer

Not so very interesting to look at, I spend hours before it every day. It brings me delight, as I fashion words and sentences, immerse myself in writing. I even enjoy much of the tedium of editing, checking, rewriting; going through multitudinous emails; interacting with friends via this communication channel. Its uses stretch back in time.[v]

I learned to type on a manual Smith Corona typewriter at age 10, my father insisting I type with all ten fingers. In those days, all tried to type without mistakes; corrections were messy and time-consuming. I supported myself by typing when professional jobs failed to come through in the 1970s; I typed my field notes every afternoon in Long Segar, where there was no electricity in 1979. As afternoon gave way to early evening, the world darkened. My neighbours, seeing me continue typing ‘blind’, feared I was a bali, a spirit. It took some convincing to alleviate their fears.

In 1990, my husband and I were building a field center in Danau Sentarum --- another place with no electricity --- using a local contractor. Although we had agreed on the work to be done, we were concerned that we had no formal contract to send to the project donors. The contractor, always happy to oblige, smiled broadly and retrieved an ancient typewriter. It had no ribbon. When we said it wouldn’t work without a ribbon, he reassured us: we would simply use carbon paper, and the power of the keys against the carbon paper would type us a nice contract! And it did.

Electric typewriters became available in the US; then in 1973, as I typed my dissertation, Dad bought me a brand-new IBM Selectric; those amazing machines allowed you to correct a mistake --- if you caught it at the right moment --- and even to vary fonts by exchanging one metal ball for another. The wonders of progress!

Forward to 1982 in Honolulu --- I had given my administrative assistant a manuscript to retype in final form, expecting to wait the usual two to three days. She would have to retype the whole thing without errors, a slow process. Instead, an hour later, she reappeared…corrected manuscript in hand! She had just gotten a Wang word processor – an early example of computerized ‘typing’. It was one of those world-altering moments as I realized what the word processor really meant for my own efficiency, my productivity. They and the computers to follow granted me something precious: time…and also a certain amount of frustration when they ‘misbehave’.

“The Great Chile Poster”

On the door, as I consider heading out into the hallway --- the next ‘room’ full of memory --- I stop at the open door. The Great Chile Poster covers almost half of this door. An orange decorative framing just inside the paper’s edge sets off its creamy background. Inside the frame are an assortment of 50 chili peppers --- red, green, yellow, orange, bright colors all, with two blackish ones the only contrast. All are arranged by size, the biggest ones toward the top, with progressively smaller varieties as one’s eye moves down the poster and to the right. They come in all shapes and sizes, big and fat, long and skinny, round and oval, heart-shaped, globular, wrinkled, smooth.

It’s a poster I’d admired since the 1970s. I love hot food and bright colors, both represented in this poster. In 2009, when we moved into this house, at last I could buy it, get it home safely, with a secure place to put it. It’s been brightening my room and contributing to my good cheer ever since.

Doing a yoga twist in my office, I get a different perspective. Anthropologists are used to learning to look at things from different perspectives when we do ethnographic research. Will I gain new insights looking at my house, at the different memories that emerge as my gaze shifts here? The realities we see, even the structures within a house, are so intimately linked with our perceptions, the angle of our view. Now, the morning light highlights the bulbous curves of the main staircase’s tooled walnut newels. Further in, the light strikes mirrors encrusted with dust – the active furnace blows the summer’s accumulations around the house. One tree out front has bare branches; on another, yellow and green leaves remain, not yet denuded by the winds of approaching winter. A few days later, the leaves disappear as winter comes, leaving bare branches everywhere. The warm and variable colors of the wood --- on the floor, the treads of each stairstep, the banister, the desk, the bead cabinet, the bookcases --- contrast sharply with the chill engendered by the snow falling beyond the window. The wintry light warms the wood and even the white of the walls, the ceiling and each step’s riser. The area invites me in.

Leaving my familiar and memory-laden office, a long ‘tunnel’ of hallway leads to the window at the front of the house. I see straight lines and right angles, a geometric view, the only exceptions the curving banister and an edge of my beading desk near the distant window. This tunnel sparks memories of a very different tunnel: I sit in a canoe, with my young son, en route from the Iban village of Pulau Majang, at the northern edge of Danau Sentarum Wildlife Reserve in West Kalimantan, headed for Badau, the County Seat.[vi] Danau Sentarum is a flooded wetland with some 60-odd villages scattered throughout. We moved there in 1992 and had crude, local boats built on which to live.

The time had come for me, a foreigner, to report to the county (kecamatan) officials. Would I be welcomed or suspect? We’d experienced both already in the communities, where some feared we were seeking virgins to kill and ‘plant’ under the field center we expected to build; some thought we were adventurers seeking ‘shrimp with diamond eyes’; others accepted us as fellow human beings, greeting us with open, friendly hospitality. A local man had agreed somewhat fearfully to take 11-year-old Alan and me to Badau in his motorized canoe. As we left the village, we headed into a truly magical tunnel of greenery that formed a low canopy closing above our heads, each plant festooned with lovely red flowers. It seemed as if we were headed into Alice’s wonderland…an indelible memory.

Through the doorway to the hall, a short landing leads to the right, then upward again toward our bedroom, downward toward another hallway. Here, I see the house’s insane topography clearly --- bringing to mind John Cleese leaping up and down staircases in Faulty Towers. There’s a slight descent, two steps down onto a second landing that leads left, between the two flights of stairs. I climb up four steps, bounded on the left by the beautiful old walnut railing, from the landing to the narrow, main hallway that looks down the stairwell to the ground floor. Straight ahead, the hallway broadens out, culminating with the window that faces the street.

Where my office has held so much of my work life, what will this hallway hold? What other aspects of the life I want to investigate will emerge here --- among the books and beads and furniture? Will there be a less ‘professional’ flavor? What eras will come to mind? What friends and family and colleagues? Will moving to a different room change my perspective, elicit a different species of memories?

Notes

[i] Literature from that project is available at https://www2.cifor.org/acm/; the first of these recent books is Adaptive Collaborative Management of Forest Landscapes: Villagers, Bureaucrats and Civil Society (London: Earthscan, 2022). A second volume was published in 2023: Responding to Environmental Issues through Adaptive Collaborative Management: From Forest Communities to Global Actors by the same publisher.

[ii] I read a fascinating novel about a purported wife of Jesus, The Book of Longings (by Sue Monk Kidd), in which the heroine has such a need to write.

[iii] Felicitas Egunyu had looked at how long ACM-like processes should/can continue effectively, in Canada and Uganda (Egunyu 2013; 2023).

[iv] See hag@mandyhaggith.net, for Mandy’s poems and novels, all of which include bears of one kind or another.

[v] Ann Patchett’s observations resonate: “The typewriter…represented both the person I had wanted to be and the person I am. Finding the typewriter [in a closet] was like finding the axe I’d used to chop the wood to build the house I lived in. It had been an essential tool.” (2021, p.75)

[vi] See Colfer 2006, for a non-technical description of our year there.

Carol’s Substack

Patchwork of Memories

From Professional to Personal

Patchwork Chapter 1

Notes

Coming soon