Tag: Autobiography

Springing a Surprise

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My garden in its winter coat

My garden has been full of surprises this year. We moved into our new house in November when the garden was settling in for winter, all bare branches and withered plants, the beds choked with leaves. We had no idea what would emerge in spring. 

First came the daffodils, several different varieties, popping up in random spots all over the yard. “She loved flowers but she just stuck them anywhere,” said a neighbor darkly about the previous owner. Well, perhaps that adds to the charm. Certainly to the surprises.

Next came the clumps of grape hyacinth and candytuft painting a blue and white palette across the side yard. 

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Adventures in Unreal Estate

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Last summer I fell down a rabbit hole into the topsy-turvy world of Unreal Estate. It would be more accurate to say I jumped down the rabbit hole. It was sudden and impulsive but it had been a long time coming. And, appropriately for a librarian, it all happened because of a bookcase. Let me explain.

My daughter is a nurse who works with the elderly. She has seen her share of falls or sudden illness crushing a senior’s quality of life. A three storied house with steep stairs was no place for us as we aged she insisted, and we resisted. Every now and again she would send me a listing for a house for sale in Foxfield Village, a senior community near her home in Middletown. It would be perfect, she claimed, single level living and so near the grandchildren. 

Quite an inducement. But there was always something wrong with the house. One seemed quite nice on the inside but the yard was a blank expanse of lawn, front and back. Not a twig or a leaf of any kind to be seen. How could I leave my garden full of flowering trees and shrubs and perennials for this sad bleak plot? There was always something. We had upgraded to stainless appliances, how could we go back to old white ones? My younger self would be appalled at my design snobbery. But I admit to it. We don’t always become better people as we age.

Then one Thursday last August she sent a listing that seemed to check all the boxes. Small but pretty garden, stainless appliances, and a glass enclosed porch, perfect for my heat and insect intolerance. There was just one problem. The open plan living space didn’t seem to have a wall long enough for my bookcase. I pored over the photos in search of an angle that would show a wall. None appeared. This was a nonnegotiable. 

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On Thin Ice

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Just after New Year in 1984 a freak ice storm at evening rush hour paralyzed traffic in Montgomery County. Within seconds the wet roads froze into slick ice skating rinks. Nothing could move for hours. Into this chaos stepped the usual first responders, but also, perhaps surprisingly, librarians. All across the County stranded motorists sought refuge in those most welcoming of places, the public libraries.

Recently the retired librarians email group featured a thread of memories of that long ago night. I remember it well. At the Gaithersburg Library drivers abandoned their cars on Montgomery Village Avenue and precariously picked their way across the ice into the library. We didn’t close. We were trapped for hours. My small children were home with my mother so at one point I tried to leave. I didn’t get far from the back door when I could go no further. I was on my hands and knees and then stranded on a tiny ice-free oasis, unable to get to my car or return inside. I was stuck there for about an hour, freezing cold and feeling rather ridiculous. Eventually a police officer drove up and rescued me, helping me back into the library. Everyone was shocked to see me, thinking I was home long before. It wasn’t till about 1:00 in the morning that we were finally able to leave.

The next day, inspired by the story of the Andes plane crash survivors who resorted to cannibalism, I wrote a satirical account of the icy night that was published in The County Express newspaper on January 4th.

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Return of the Moon

~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ 2 Comments

A sequel to Farewell My Lovely Moon

My New Moon

Santa came early to our house this year. He didn’t enter stealthily down the chimney. He announced his arrival with a ring of the doorbell. He had a white beard and wore a jolly smile, but not a red suit. He handed me the most unusual Christmas gift I’ve ever received – the moon. Or at least a moon.

After I published my sad story about the missing moon I learned that Brian and Caryl, artists who live on my street, had acquired some of the dismantled lamp globes. They repurposed them into beautiful hanging lanterns of many colors.

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Farewell My Lovely Moon

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A tale of unintended consequences

As darkness settled over our house a pure full moon, hanging low in the sky, cast its calm and comforting light through our family room window. It seemed a good omen on our first night in a new home. No sound of howling wolves or other nocturnal creatures disturbed the quiet. Just a lovely silent moon shining it’s gentle light across the garden. 

We’d lived in the house several weeks before it finally dawned on us that there couldn’t be a full moon every night. A moon that never waxed or waned or hid it’s face behind a cloud. We laughed when we realized that our moon was no celestial body but the globe shaped lamppost on the path beyond the garden fence. The ground slopes upward toward the path giving our moon the illusion of hanging in the sky.

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Lacrosse Past and Present

~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ 2 Comments
Dakota play lacrosse on the Minnesota River. Oil painting 1848.

Goin’ fishin’? Wotcha catch? Where’s the kippers?

We endured these taunts and more, delivered in the broad Cockney of our neighborhood and accompanied by sneering laughter, as my sister and I walked home from the bus stop. Our Catholic school uniforms already made us a target of derision for the local kids, but now at the end of term we carried our lacrosse sticks with us. What else could these odd things be but fishing nets? The kids seemed delighted to have something new in their arsenal.

Girls clumsily cradle

Our experience of playing lacrosse at school wasn’t much more positive. On the playing field up the hill behind the school we ran back and forth in miserable grey English weather. Shorts were not allowed for convent school girls and sweatpants were unheard of. We wore gabardine divided skirts, shorts disguised as skirts with box pleats, and Aertex blouses. Our formidable games mistress Miss Sands wore a below the knee tweed skirt and a sensible cardigan with a whistle on a ribbon around her neck. For some reason lost to history we called her Daisy. If the rain was too heavy for outdoor sports she took us to the gym and made us dance the Highland Fling. I’m not sure which activity we dreaded most.

Cradle girls! she would cry, Cradle! This referred to the back and forth swinging motion of the stick we had to perfect to keep the ball secure in the net. Up and down the field we ran cradling and dropping the ball, and cradling some more. It seemed a very tedious business. There was occasional drama when the dangerously hard ball would hit some unfortunate girl in the head. No one in those days seemed concerned about concussion though. My sister remembers an incident when a too generous application of the stuff used to condition the leather netting caused her ball to be firmly stuck as she ran cradling away. Miss Sands called out Oh well held Byrne! in her fluting Queen’s accent. But of course my sister was unable to pass the ball so her sporting triumph was short lived.

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The NeverEnding Speech

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Sather Gate at University of California Berkeley

It was the most memorable speech I’ve ever heard, though I can’t remember a single word of it. Let us enter the scene at about the one hour mark when the audience gathered on the sun dappled lawn broke into sustained applause. Though a passer by might have taken the applause for appreciation, for the families perched on uncomfortable folding chairs the vigorous clapping had a desperate air. Surely this time the speaker would take the hint and wind things up. It was about the fourth or fifth time that the audience had broken into spontaneous applause at any small break in the torrent of words, some even standing, to try to bring the agony to an end. But each time the speaker, a tiny man whose head barely peeked over the podium, waited patiently until the clapping ceased and then resumed speaking in his barely audible whisper of a voice.

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Marks Gate Estate

~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ 9 Comments

Note to my American readers: If the word estate makes you think of a grand English country house be advised. In England council house developments, the equivalent of American public housing, are called estates.

Mum outside our house on Marks Gate Estate

In 1955 when I was seven years old we moved into a brand new house on Marks Gate Estate outside London in Essex. We were a family of five, my parents, my grandmother, my sister and I. Because my mother was pregnant with a third child we were moved up the waiting list for a council house. The wait was long. My parents had been on the list since shortly after I was born.

I remember the excitement of that day. The estate still had the raw appearance of a building site, our road not yet paved. The back garden was a patch of dirt, graced only with a washing line. My sister and I ran through the empty rooms. The front door led into a narrow entry hall with a small storage room at the back. Off the hall in front was a kitchen with an eating area and in back a living room with fireplace. Outside the kitchen door was a covered space for dustbins and coal storage. Upstairs the bare board floors were stained in places where it looked like the builders had mixed their materials. There were three bedrooms, one not much bigger than today’s closets, a lavatory, and a bathroom with something known as an airing cupboard where the hot water heater sat. By today’s standards it was a tiny house for a growing family but to us it seemed a mansion. It was one of over a million council homes built in Britain between 1945 and the late 1950’s.

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How I Learned To Speak American

~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ 6 Comments

A recent online discussion in a group for Brits living in America concerned how our accents evolve over time. It reminded me of an embarrassing incident from my first weeks in America. This piece was first published in The Dabbler in November 2012.

What linguistic traps are lurking in this gutter?

Americans still hear my English accent, but in England people think I’m an American. In truth my accent must be hovering somewhere in the Mid-Atlantic after so many years immersion in the American dialect. It takes a long time for an accent to change. I still say “ban-ah-na” and “tom-ah-to” much to my grandsons’ amusement. But after being put in charge of library work schedules years ago I did quickly change over to saying “skedule.”  I had to say the word so many times in the course of a day that “shedule” just began to sound pretentious to my own ears. As a new supervisor there was no advantage in conforming to the stereotype of a haughty, condescending Brit. But for the most part accents change unconsciously and imperceptibly like rocks polished to smoothness over millennia of tumbling in a riverbed. You land on a foreign shore speaking precise, clipped BBC English and then journey back years later to find yourself taken for a foreigner in your own hometown. 

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