How I Learned to Travel Light

A single small suitcase, my violin, and a doll that I clutched to my flat chest--that is how I left Spain almost sixty years ago.  My parents carried one suitcase each, plus my father's violin and viola.  We were going on a great adventure to the heart of darkness.  And we were going to cross the Atlantic to New York, and then south all the way to Ecuador, by plane. 

My mother had a special suit made for the flight, and bought a new hat.  My father got a haircut.  My aunts tied freshly-ironed red ribbons around my pony tails.  PanAmerican Airlines treated us royally and issued us elegant blue-and-white flight bags, but they were adamant on luggage limits.  Hence the single suitcase, and the single doll.
 In my suitcase were a couple of dresses, some socks and underwear.  But the rest of my family of dolls, the little terracotta Madonna that stood at the head of my bed, and the Spanish translations of Mary Poppins, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Tom Sawyer were all left behind--along with my aunts and uncles and my four grandparents, not to mention the German nuns and the girls who had made fun of my glasses in school.

We were going, but only for a year.  In retrospect, remembering the look in my grandmothers' eyes, I think they must have known that we would never return to live in Barcelona.  But we, or at least I, didn't know that.  We were only leaving for a year.  We'd be back.

So when we arrived in Quito, and rented a house and unpacked our suitcases, we sort of camped out.  Since we were only staying for a year, and all furniture had to be hand-made to order, my parents got the bare minimum.  I remember a contemporary-looking but uncomfortable spindle-backed sofa.  And I especially remember the kitchen table, made by a less renowned artisan out of improperly-dried wood, which promptly curled up at the edges.

When the Ecuadorian government, to my parents' surprise and dismay, ran out of money to honor my father's contract, they nevertheless kept promising payment "any day now."  Before we knew it almost four years had elapsed, and we were still making do with the curly table and a couple of dented cooking pots.

When, out of the jungle mists, the opportunity arose to come to the United States, I packed my
suitcase and my violin and, leaving the doll behind, followed my parents to Birmingham, Alabama.  There again we camped out for the first few years, for how did we know whether things would work out?

I remember going to Sears with my  mother to buy some china, a couple of beds, and an upholstered sofa, less artisanal but more comfortable than the Ecuadorian one.  Even though there were no more financial disasters like the one that had befallen us in Quito, it took us a long time to settle.  When I needed a desk I bought a piece of plywood and screwed four legs into it.  It shook and wobbled with every stroke of my pen--and that is how I felt too, kind of wobbly and provisional.

The ponderous bookcases and dining room suite, the four-poster bed and the marble-topped dresser that had been handed down to my parents on their marriage, their crystal, china, paintings and silverware, not to mention all our books, remained in the apartment in Barcelona.  Eventually my mother had the bed and the dresser and the dining room suite shipped to the U.S., but by then I had once again packed my suitcase and my violin and gone off to get married.

Over the following decades I did accumulate a houseful of belongings, and though I never felt tied to a particular place, I did drag everything that could be moved from house to house and state to state.  But now I've come full circle, and am almost back to the single-suitcase, one-doll stage.  I have so far given away thirty-eight boxes of books.  I have taken two carloads of pots and pans, including my beloved stainless steel milking pail, to the auction with nary a tear.

But I'm not nearly done.  And as I close the flaps on one more box of stuff that seems to hold my past, it occurs to me that the exercise I went through as a ten-year-old, picking out which one of all my dolls I would take with me to the New World, prepared me well for choosing which objects will accompany me to the continent I am about to enter.

Chicken Fence

Those of you who follow the complications of my simple life may recall that several years ago I tried to disguise the ugly wire fence around my hen yard.  My idea was to thread sticks through the spaces in the wire net so as to hide the wire and achieve the rustic look of a wattle fence:  http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/search?q=wattle+fence

The wattle fence was a dramatic failure, because after the first winter the sticks started to disintegrate, and also because Wolfie discovered the pleasure of pulling out the remaining ones and carrying them around the yard.  Worst of all, the weight of the sticks pulled the wire out of shape, so that it sagged and looked even worse than it had in its pre-wattle stage.

My next attempt at disguise was to plant four Leyland cypresses in front of the side of the fence that is visible from the patio.  But last fall was a bad season for wild apples in Vermont, with the result that hungry deer came much closer to people's houses than they normally do.  Our deer came all the way into the yard and chewed those little cypresses almost to extinction.

My urge to improve the look of the fence was complicated by my wish to avoid a suburban look--as with the pre-made fences at Home Depot and Lowe's--as well as the industrial farm look offered by the manufacturers of serious livestock fencing.  I wanted a custom-made fence--nothing fancy, just sturdy and functional and non-sagging.

But good fence builders don't grow on trees, and it took me the better part of five years to find mine, via a friend whose sheep he shears.

A fence builder who shears sheep?  Yes, and who farms his family's land and keeps cows, chickens, sheep and meat goats.  And who, with his wife, home-schools their passel of kids.  You need to have more than one string to your bow if you want to farm in Vermont.

The fence builder showed up at the appointed hour, backing his truck and big trailer all the way up our perilous driveway.  He was accompanied by one of his kids, who helped get rid of the last sticks still clinging to the old wattle fence.  He came again the next morning, with two kids, worked some more, and left behind this marvel of a fence:

 

Now whenever I look outside I rejoice at the perpendicularity of the posts, the tautness of the wire, and the overall neatness--even the elegance--of my hen yard fence.  The fence runs all the way around the back of the shed, so you cannot see its full glory.  But you get the idea.

And just look at the girls, pecking at the dirt, safe from ermines, weasels, fisher cats, raccoons, foxes, feral dogs, coydogs,  wolf-dog hybrids, coyotes, bears and mountain lions. They are as happy as I am.

First Flight

It was 1954, and we were leaving. We were taking off. We were going to America.*

The America we were going to was in the South--Ecuador. I was only ten years old and I was going to do something that nobody I personally knew had done before: get in an airplane and fly to America.

No more German nuns, no more snooty classmates, no more routine--maybe my mother would even forget to make me practice the violin. I was going to America! On Pan American Airlines! The flight from Barcelona to Quito took weeks to arrange, and many trips to the airline's elegant office on the Passeig de Gracia. But eventually my father came home with the tickets and three gorgeous navy blue airline bags, emblazoned with the logo PAA.

The trip was going to take an entire week--longer than the trip to the moon would take fifteen years later. And it was a bit like going to the moon. "You'll be going to school with Indians" a girl in my class said. And we both imagined fierce North American Indians, being chased by cowboys.

My grandparents on both sides did their best to hide their sorrow. I was the only grandchild, and no matter how much my parents repeated that the contract with the Ecuadorian government to provide chamber music concerts for the cultured elite was only for a year, they must have sensed that we would never really go back to Spain.

On a sunny Mediterranean spring morning my father, my mother, and I, dressed in our best clothes, got into a fat four-engine prop plane. Air planes in those days, dear youthful reader, were gracious, spacious environments where a bevy of beautiful stewardesses looked after you like ministering angels. Impossibly slim in their navy uniforms and high heels, they nevertheless hefted your luggage and stowed it securely in the overhead compartments. They quacked life-and-death instructions at you in English and then went round smiling, distributing packs of chewing gum as the plane took off.

Chewing gum! I had only once had chewing gum in my life before, and then only a single Chiclet, an experience that had engraved itself on my tastebuds and my brain. Faced with a whole package of it, I kept popping more of those little white tiles into my mouth as the old ones lost flavor. I knew that chewing gum could be pulled and stretched, and I entertained myself doing that for a while, as the engines hummed and my mother remarked on the smoothness of the flight. When my fingers started feeling sticky, I went to the bathroom, opened the door with my sticky hand, tried to wash off the chewing gum with water....

During the flight, the stewardess handed me a coloring book and a box of Crayola crayons, in which I was sorely disappointed. I was used to beautiful Caran D'Ache colored pencils, and the waxy crayons, with their synthetic perfume and their thick lines, offended me. At meal time we were served a bizarre little tray, with all the courses on it at once, and a cup of dark liquid that my father assumed was consomme...only to realize, to his great disgust, that it was Coca-Cola. How was one expected to drink that stuff with a meal?

In New York, my mother, sick with vertigo and, I suspect, the emotion of the leave-taking, went to bed while my father and I went for a walk on Fifth Avenue. Two mornings later, as our plane was taking off, my parents pointed out the river of traffic flowing into the city--my first sight of rush hour.

In Bogota we spent three days in a beautiful hotel, where I ate my first grapefruit and where I underwent the "Humiliation of the Socks." For some reason, I ran out of clean white anklets, and my mother, rather than allow me to go sockless, forced me to put on...a pair of my father's black socks. This, I knew, was earthquake country, and I would gladly have perished if only my feet could have been hidden under some boulder.

A two-engine Avianca plane took us on the last leg of the trip, though we had to refuel in the southern Colombian city of Cali, where I had my first experience of tropical heat. Then the plane climbed laboriously up over the green jungle and, dipping and swaying, into the Andes.

We emerged dazed into Quito's thin air. The airport--almost 10,000 feet above sea level-- was ringed with the highest mountains we had ever seen: Cotopaxi, Chimborazo, Pichincha--all of them volcanoes, all of them active. I clasped my doll to my chest and pushed my glasses up on my nose. The great adventure had begun.

*"America" in Spanish denotes the landmass from the northern tip of Canada to the Tierra del Fuego.