Swallows

“Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them.  The least we can do is try to be there.” – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I’ve been reading Annie Dillard.  It’s my first time in her world.  When I bought Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the guy at the used bookstore gave me a dollar discount because he likes that book so much.  “I’ve tried to read that book three times, and each time I’ve gotten so inspired that I had to stop.  I can’t finish it!” he said.  I get it now – a month, and only 91 pages, in.  It’s so good sometimes it hurts.  Instead of inspiring expectations, though, it leaves a satisfied trail.  Nuggets of light and airiness within the pages, images that bring you soaring alongside her and the banks of her creek. 

She is enthralled by the natural world, and will explain for five or ten or fifteen pages the excitement she feels when she finds the egg cases of praying mantises and watches them hatch, and grow, and mate.  When I read her prose, the awe she feels drips into me like honey, and I want to go outside and practice seeing. 

Last Sunday, I spent the afternoon on the Delaware River, tubing.  A small group of us, two cars full, drove up there and paid our thirty bucks to be bused to and from the river.  We snuck in beers and meandered lazily up to the floating hot dog stand halfway down the six-mile stretch of river we were on.  Hamburgers and pepsi.  A juvenile bald eagle and swallows.

The swallows hovered in two packs along the course of our five-hour ride.  We came at them slowly, idly in our rafts, so they didn’t notice and instead went about their business.  ‘Cigars with wings’ Matt would say, but they weren’t Chimney Swifts, but Bank Swallows, I discovered later.  White belly, brown above, each wing longer than the stout little body they propelled together.  I could feel a breeze now and then on the river in my tube, but they could feel it first.  I would watch a tiny bird swoop across in a straight line and then rise and turn, suddenly swept into the air current.  These birds were perfectly in tune to the movement of the wind, that invisible substance of earth and sky.  I realized acutely the fact that all of us – every element and creature in my immediate surroundings – were going in the direction we desired.  Rock stood firm as water fell over it, resisting in places but always bending.  Bird flew true and then flexed a wing and dove, depending on the texture of the wind on which it hovered.  We humans bumbled along on our rafts.

Annie Dillard wrote this of sitting by Pilgrim Creek, watching swallows and all manner of other elements.  “I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spider webs made invisible by the gathering dark, or take a chance on seeing the carp, or scan the mudbank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying upstream with their tails forked, so fast.” 

Read that last bit again.  Doesn’t that just lift you up? 

Not my swallows.  From telegraph.co.uk.

Back in time

Peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall

The peaches are excellent this year, succulent and juicy. White and yellow peaches both have wooed me in the past week with their tartly sweet flavor that melts into the corners of my mouth.

This is a point of nostalgia for me. I’ll admit, over the past few years I have avoided peaches entirely, skirting them in the grocery store and even at the farmers market. ‘They won’t be as good as my dad’s peaches’ is what goes through my mind. Ever since my dad sold his final few acres of Jersey Queens and John Boys in that hideaway south Jersey town, I’ve upheld this opinion. But this year – perhaps because I have grown more aware of the trials and rewards of growing food, I have come back around to the fuzzy fruit that followed me through my childhood and adolescence.

Our old Russian tractor, with orchard behind.

Roadstown, New Jersey - Home of the Ware Chair. That’s what the sign when you entered the town used to say. There isn’t a town really. There used to be a general store, it looks like, and a small town center. But now those buildings have been worn down into barns. They house farm tractors if they’re lucky, or flocks of pigeons if they’ve just been around awhile. I used to go down there and spend a day, or weeks in the summer. I would bring liters of water and packets of Emergen-C to revive me halfway through the day, after the dust and relentless sun began to get to me. My dad would fill the gas tank of the old John Deere or Belarus, and I would jump onboard. It felt like boarding a horse to be honest, saddling up. And then I would sit up there, all day long, driving up and down each row, keeping the Deere’s left tire aligned with the left side of the sod strip down the middle, waking up enough to turn the machine deftly around each hairpin turn. It was five rows at a time – you’d do one and then skip a row on your way back, skip another on your second turn and then fill in the blanks. Every so often I would stand up for a row, feeling tall and flexible on the rumbling mower. And then I would sit down and the rows would keep on going by.

I would sell the excess peaches sometimes. My dad sold most of his peaches to a farmers co-op, Jersey Fruit, but by the end even they were giving him pennies for his produce. I would go out to the orchard and pick all the ripe fruit he had to leave on the trees and reserve a booth at Cowtown, sell it all straight to the consumer for three times what we made through the co-op. Once or twice my mom and I took a dozen boxes to Reading Terminal Market in Philly, set up a table and sold them all quick. We handed out samples, that’s what did it. His peaches were good, honest.

We even branded the business, thanks to Lindsey Fyfe's handiwork.

But then he sold the trees, and the tractors, and the irrigation equipment we had all set up and painstakingly fixed each year – my brother, my dad, and I, and he moved to the city. I haven’t been down there since, though every summer my muscles and my mind still long for it. Hours sitting up there on that John Deere were some of the best I spent through college. I learned a dozen Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs up there, borrowing my dad’s heavy-duty discman and black leather fanny pack. I cleared my mind just going up and down those rows, stopping for rabbits and birds and whatever else I saw.

Peaches aren’t the same when you buy them in the store. I guess they never will be, even though they’re damn good this year. Still, whenever it hails in June or when there’s a drought in July, I think of the peaches. Or the peaches that never were. The peaches that my dad and I would be picking off the trees right now if he still owned those trees way down there in Jersey. And then, if they were ours, they would be the best peaches you ever tasted.

In Mourning

My garden has a terminal illness. 

Yesterday I came home from a girls weekend at the beach to find debris littering the bean-side of the garden, and the ivy that had been growing unchecked along the back fence hanging precariously over the snap peas and eggplant.  It looked like a tornado had torn through my triangle of life, breaking tomato plants in half and shaking climbing beans from their trellises.

The neighbors had cleared the foot and a half of garage that butted against our fence of its ivy, ripping sticky cleavers from their whitewashed brick and allowing the top-heavy vines to bow sickeningly over our cultivated beds.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only damage.
 
I picked up the broken bits of ivy last night, and hoped a day of sunshine would perk up the flowering beans and help the tomatoes straighten up.  Instead, I came home to a garden even droopier than the night before.  The bean leaves, with their first purple flowers just opening along two or three vines taller than me, were upside down.  The climbers were all taking nose-dives instead of reaching sunward.  The herbs – our six basil plants and out-of-control cilantro – were falling amongst themselves like drunk teenagers, and the lettuce patch splayed out as if a beach ball had repeatedly flounced on top of it.

It turns out it wasn’t just debris, but something much more terrible.  I called my dad, the trusty ex-farmer, and told him my garden’s symptoms.  Is there some sort of fungus that would attack every one of my plants?, I asked.  Some kind of blight that I’ve never heard of?  He asked if we were at the bottom of a hill, if some kind of poisonous runoff could have swept through the yard.  I went to ask my neighbor.

Sure enough, poison was the culprit.  Weeds B Gone to be exact.  She had dumped a bunch on the roof of her garage, “to keep the ivy from coming back.”  And then it had rained.

The ivy looks fine, by the way.  It’s just the vegetables that are dying.

It’ll take a few days, but one by one these plants – almost all of which I started from seed – will yellow, and shrivel, and die.  I don’t think I can bear to see that, so I’ll probably go out there early tomorrow morning and yank the whole lot of them out. 

But before I do that I’ll have some time to think about what we are doing to the earth, and to ourselves.  I know- this Weeds B Gone is just a bit of over-the-counter yard material.  But this is also about the grasses and the flowers and the food that we live on.  Eventually those chemicals will drain into the Wissahickon just down the hill, and from there into the Delaware (not to mention into our taps), then to the bay, then the ocean.  So many people don’t think about how our actions affect the rest of the world, not to mention our local ecosystem or our neighbors.

I’ll start over again, this time by pulling out all that ivy and buying a bunch of pots and fresh soil.  But I won’t forget the lessons this episode has to teach me, and the sight of a beautiful bursting garden simply turning over and dying.

Marigolds Everywhere

'This is a conspiracy!,' the typewriter-printed tag proclaims.  'We are conspiring the cover the city with marigolds.'  That's right- those dusty trash-laden squares of earth that poke through the long avenues of concrete will soon be bursting joyously into oranges and golds.  If it rains, that is.  And if we can recruit enough co-conspirators.

Our new ammunition may help.  I spent Sunday making seed bombs with the founders of the conspiracy - a due I met in India on Mojo Plantation, and an old friend from Philly.  Fueled by home-brewed dandelion wine, we patted out circles of red clay, sprinkled a dash of seed starting mix and then layered on a healthy dose of seeds, finally squeezing the clay shut around the treasure inside.  These brown beauties will be handed out/sold for a pittance this weekend at the Trenton Avenue Arts Festival, and will certainly explode into at least a couple conspiratory buds each.

The idea?  Keep a few of these miniature potatoes with you at all times, so you can be ready to launch them toward the next sad piece of bald city earth.  The next time it rains, you may see a spear of hopeful green shooting through.

Grateful

I live in the city now, but I have a country life.  I hike along a creek at least once a day.  I weed my garden a few times a week.  I am experimenting with seed swaps and growing raspberry bushes and coming home early on Friday nights.  I have to say, it’s been great.  Add to that my awesome new job, and honestly I feel a little like I’ve struck gold.  It’s exciting to be delving incredibly deep into work that is engaging both intellectually and socially.  The best part is, it’s in my own community, not in some remote rainforest in which I have little connection.  I seem to have lost my travel bug, at least temporarily.

I apologize for writing a recap post after disappearing for so long.  It feels necessary, given the drastic transitions life has offered up in the past few months.  In order to move forward and start writing about the really interesting stuff (snap peas popping out of the ground!  CAFOs in Pennsylvania!  Training Belle to be a good dog!), I need to step back a minute and see what has happened to my life.

Belle, sitting on a seed tray (bad dog!)

Matt and I moved to Mount Airy.  Technically we live in Philadelphia, but to me it’s a retreat every day.  Our two-bedroom walkup with fenced-in yard is home to a few new raised beds ready to burst with strawberries, spinach, and summer squash.  After the damp and musty room we shared in India, with bathroom full of geckos and the occasional errant leech, this is practically a vacation home. 

We adopted a dog.  We started jobs.  We built a compost tumbler.  We struggle to fit all of the things we want to do into seven short days every week.

At work, I get to think about the effect that a millennium-old shale deposit deep under Pennsylvania could have on the forests I love, the water I drink, and the small town communities that make my state what it is.  I get to talk politics and motivate people who think they don’t care about an issue to get off their high horse of pessimism, even if it just means taking thirty seconds to write a letter.  These things are so much easier when you speak the same language as the people you’re working with.

Mid-May strawberries

I am beginning to find the balance I’ve been searching for, between urban stimulation, rejuvenation in nature, and, ultimately, self-sufficiency.  Now that I’m back into a busy schedule, with work and school and various side commitments, I’ve become a bit more realistic about that last goal.  I squeeze in yogurt making on a Saturday morning when I know I’ll be home in the afternoon.  We got a bread machine.  I miss the warmth of fresh dough under my hands, but at least we have fresh homemade bread every week.  These are the compromises you make to find balance amongst all the various things you love.  And when that happens, there’s nothing left to do but feel deeply grateful. 

Bursting at the Seams

 

My sourdough starter has a mind of its own!

The best thing I learned in India was how to make food.  Not even how to grow it, but how to create real, edible food out of the simplest raw materials.  The foods that we can make for ourselves, yet we continue to buy.  Over and over.  As prices go up.  As quality goes down.  Bread.  Yogurt.  Hummus.  Granola. 

Some of you will say, those are simple things; why not go a little more exotic?  Well, I’m a beginner, and for me, these are the essentials.  Especially bread and yogurt.  Bread because it’s the base of so many meals, and yogurt because I just can’t get enough of it.  Matthew and I together consume upwards of two quarts of the good stuff each week, and at four bucks a pop for the creamy organic variety (Pequea is our absolute favorite), it can get a tad expensive for two expat returnees without jobs. 

But let me start with bread.  In India, our host and the mother of the farm, Sujata, reigned supreme over the kitchen.  During our first week in residence there, she approached our group of interns with four squares of chocolate and four mystery herbs.  Placing one secret handful in each of our palms she asked us to guess.  Whoever spoke correctly would get a sweet reward.  Rosemary, cilantro, sage, and . . . was it all spice?  (Yes, this farm had everything). 

She came to us with gifts to nurture our curiosity and singular passions.  When she discovered my ambition of culinary self-sufficiency, she slipped a ball of sticky sourdough inoculum from the loaf she was kneading and whispered crude instructions:  “Add flour and water and a little sugar.  Let it sit in the sun.  Knead it again.  Let it sit again.  Bake it for a while.”  I spent an afternoon with that first loaf of bread, watching it rise under a red-checked cloth in the sun, pressing gingerly into the soft give of its hardening skin, gauging when it was ready for the oven.

In India it was easy.  Bread was made every day, so there was always a rising ball of sourdough from which I could pluck my inoculum and grow my own sustenance out of flour and sugar. 

In the United States, things became a bit more complicated.  Active dry yeast is easy to buy, and rises well enough.  But it wasn’t self-sufficient.  I didn’t want to recreate my inoculum each and every time I started a loaf, which meant keeping a stock of dry yeast on-hand, another purchased ingredient.  It seemed so inefficient, so wasteful, so American. 

Sourdough, as far as I know (and I know very little about these things) simply means that the yeast never stops living.  Once you get a sourdough starter going, and if you nurture it with the respect and diligence that any life deserves, it breathes, and not only that but it creates.  It rises and falls, it secretes liquid, it gathers a sweet smell.  It gives bread, and pancakes, and muffins and more, on and on and on.

So I began my own starter.  I mixed in one packet of dry yeast with flour, water, and sugar and watched it grow.  I stirred it every day for a week, maybe more, until it was ripe with suggestive bubbles of air and a curd-like aroma.  And then I made some bread.  I fed the baby starter, and then I made more bread, bringing one loaf to a dinner party and giving another as a gift.  I have fallen into a sort of scientific love with my jar of sourdough just waiting to happen.

Living like this, off of the muscles in our very own hands (for kneading dough certainly requires them), is just about the most basic instinct we have.  And yet almost no one in my culture does this.  The skill of baking bread, or curdling and preserving milk, is elemental.  The act establishes a link with our grandparents and our most long-ago ancestors.  It creates a space where we can remove ourselves from an overpowering consumer culture and regain a hint of what we, as humans, once were.  And it allows us to grow.  Or perhaps I should speak only for myself, for I can see the mirror into my life that the yeast provides, growing ever more expansive with each new creation.

 

The starter grows into a new, bigger jar.

Homes

Somehow, even being back in Philadelphia, I can’t escape literature about India.  I recently picked up a book that I had tried to read on my very first trip to India six years ago.  This passage, a dialogue between two soldiers – one from Bangladesh and the other Britain - resonated with me:

“ ‘Please.  Do me this one, great favor, Jones.  If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home – if you, if we, get back to our respective homes – if ever you hear anyone speak of the East,’ and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, ‘hold your judgment.  If you are told ‘they are all this’ or ‘they do this’ or ‘their opinions are these,’ withhold your judgment until all the facts are upon you.  Because that land they call ‘India’ goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same among that multitude, then you are mistaken.  It is merely a trick of the moonlight.’ ” – White Teeth, Zadie Smith

This last trip to India was a roller coaster.  It surprised me and rocked my center and taught me many unexpected things.  While during my first trip to India I was moved to extend my stay, this time around I felt instead the overpowering pull of home.  It is good to be back among my family and friends, but I am still sorting through the emotions of the last five months, and especially the final few weeks.

In South India, I saw wild elephants for the first time.  I pulled ginger and turmeric out of the ground, and tasted coffee cherries and raw green peppercorns.  I tugged leeches off my bloody feet and rode a ferris wheel fifteen stories above the ground.  In a way, the months were like an extreme adventure camp, punctuated by attempts to break through communication barriers and do something meaningful and good.  The people I met welcomed me to their homes, and simultaneously pushed me away.  Even while I was learning and connecting and contributing, I was being cut loose.  I was untethered to the community, and the locals could sense it.  So many of my first conversations in India centered on the question:  why would I leave my family and everything I know to come here for a year?  It was a good question and one that, by the end, I couldn’t fully answer.  My life is here on the east coast of the U.S.A.; my work is here; my family is here; and now, I am here.

But even though it wasn’t the experience I had hoped for – not the unself-conscious exchange of cultures or the scene of a breakthrough cooperative movement – I can recognize that it’s not India’s fault, just as it’s not my fault.  India can never be the same experience twice, and neither can I experience India the same way twice.  We are two separate entities that, this time around, passed each other in the night.  

Meandering Through Literary and Literal Kerala

Kerala, Part 2

Flash back to November, when Matt and I were exploring Kerala, getting bitten by leeches and sneaking up on wild elephants.  After the adventure in Wayanad, we took a bus on beautifully paved roads, in the twilight, to the coast, where we stayed at Kannur Beach House, a cozy little place right on the water.  Our hosts there, Rosie and Nasir, cooked up lovely meals of seafood and vegetables, always with fresh fruit for dessert.  And then they packed us up and sent us down to Kochi by train.

I mentioned before that what had pulled me toward Kochi was the setting of one my favorite books, The God of Small Things.  Re-reading the book now, after visiting the story’s landscape, is a pleasure.  In her opening chapter, Arundhati Roy describes a small town near Kochi:

“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.  The days are long and humid.  The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees.  Red bananas ripen.  Jackfruits burst.  Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air.  They they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.

The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.

But by early June the south-west monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with.  The countryside turns an immodest green…”

We were there in November, after the monsoon had dried up, and before people start longing again for the rain to quench their crops’ thirst.  But the region, halfway between Karnataka and the tip of the subcontinent, still had that mysterious, swollen sense to it.  Palm trees hung heavy with coconuts; coffee trees burst forth with green berries turning the slightest shades of red; paddy fields yawned across the landscape on both sides of the train we were riding, their wild green browning slightly in the dryness. 

A hint of revolution carried on, in stenciled red sickles marking each small town a dozen times.  In Kerala, socialism meets globalization on a local scale.  Locals talked about the new Asian Trade Agreement that would make the coconuts dripping off every palm tree practically profitless.  It costs too much to harvest the fruit, given the strong labor unions in the state, and now that Kerala coconuts will compete with those of Malaysia, Indonesia, and half a dozen other countries, they may just rot 100 feet above ground.  One day, we went out to watch a coconut cutter on Rosie and Nasir’s land.  A wiry man, who must have been over forty, placed a bamboo ladder halfway up a palm, deftly scaled it and then wrapped his arms and legs around the tree itself.  He shimmied the rest of the way up in thirty seconds flat, and then began to swipe at the coconuts with a small machete.  It’s an art that is slowly losing ground in this state where a coconut is not just a fruit, but a way of life and a symbol of identity. (The NY Times has been following the story of coconut harvesters in Kerala)

In Kochi itself, the atmosphere was certainly less rural, but no less interesting.  You have to take a ferry from the major city of Ernakulam to the more manageable island town of Fort Kochi, and we couldn’t do it fast enough.  Indian cities are tiring; towns, even if they are tourist traps, are rejuvenating.  Fort Kochi is one of the best.  After a day of bumming around the Princess Street tourist track, and eating all manner of international cuisine, we walked back toward the ferry landing and found a place to rent bicycles for the day. 

Oh to ride a bike again, even for a day.  Mine was purple and had a wire basket on the front.  Matt’s was taller and blue-green.  Both had self-locking back wheels, which made it easy to hop on and off at every antique shop, palace, and temple we saw. 

First was the Dutch Palace, former home of Kerala’s maharajas and colonial Dutch royalty.  While under construction, the Palace showed us neatly through the recent history of the city, from bare-breasted maharaja women to the introduction of European silk blouses, leading to the modern sari and (this is at least how we took it) contemporary Indian modesty.  What a bastion of tolerance Kerala was!  Until recently, it had been a matrilineal society, and thus boasted some of the broadest women’s rights in the subcontinent.  The ancient rajas, nearly two thousand years ago, had given refuge and sovereignty to a group of exiled Jews.  Until they started fighting among themselves for power, the Jews had set up their own kingdom, north of Kochi in the town of Cranganore.  Leave it to colonialism to dismantle this legacy of tolerance, and to subjugate women as best they could by outlawing matrilineality.

Next we were off to Jew Town, a short bike ride along the edge of the island.  Jew Town is where most of the small collection of Jews left over from the kingdom just north of Kochi ended up after the uprising there in 1471.  The man who had killed his own brother for the throne had been exiled, and escaped his family’s wrath by swimming across the backwaters to Kochi with his wife on his back.  This is how Jew Town began, and the old synagogue there tells the story in simple, vivid paintings of the event.  When we visited the synagogue, the aging Indian man who collected our 10 rupee entrance fee kept leaning into the room to his right and hollering to the influx of guests that ‘you need to start at the left!  And then walk right!’ to get the story straight.  The story that begins with the man swimming across the channel with his wife on the back, and ends with most of the Jews returning to Israel and abandoning their temporary kingdom. 

Later, when we were in the synagogue itself, an airy blue and white tiled temple, the same man came in behind a group of ten or twelve foreigners and explained that he was one of ten Jews left in Jew Town, the last Jewish family remaining.  They still gather here weekly to pray.  I tried to picture the family here, in this most simple of holy places, in this country where most expressions of faith are tinted in extravagance.  The giant gold-painted Ganesh that a temple just hoisted next to the highway to Bangalore.  The fire-blowing Dasara floats.  Even the Santa Cruz Basilica, which we had visited the day before, had decorated its altar to Jesus with dancing Christmas lights, and blasted hymns to what sounded like a synthesized surf rock beat. 

The small courtyard surrounding the synagogue was lined with old layers of slate marking the deaths of various members of the community.  It was closed to visitors, or I would have perused the history there.  It was a quiet place; a place of exile and loss and community, but also a place still alive with faith and practice, tucked into the alleys of a small tourist town. 

Jew Town’s narrow streets burst with antique shops selling a mixture of faux-antiques and actual artifacts from the last few hundred years.  Iron and bronze are at home here, and hanging oil lamps and rusted gothic keys rub shoulders with gigantic metal and carved-wood elephants.  At one shop in proper Fort Kochi we befriended a shopkeeper and his mother who just happened to come from Kottayam, the town of The God of Small Things.  Trying to be unobtrusive, I peppered them with questions.  ‘But why would you want to go there?’ the mother said wearily.  ‘There’s nothing there.’  When she said that she knew the family who became the story, I got really interested, but uncomfortable as well.  It’s a sad tale that Arundhati Roy writes, of caste conflict and violence and a small town growing up into something uglier than it was.  I have found that most Indians are not fond of the novel, and will instead point me to literature that is a little less confrontational, a little less blunt about the state of things in India.  When Roy’s narrator returns to Ayemenem and Kottayam a decade (and a hundred pages) later, she observes:

“Years later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed…

Despite the fact that it was June, and raining, the river was no more than a swollen drain now.  A thin ribbon of thick water that lapped wearily at the mud banks on either side, sequined with the occasional silver slant of a dead fish.  It was choked with a succulent weed, whose furred brown roots waved like thin tentacles under water.  Bronze-winged lily-trotters walked across it.  Splay-footed, cautious.

Once it had had the power to evoke fear.  To change lives. But now its teeth were drawn, its spirit spent.  It was just a slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea.  Bright plastic bags blew across its viscous, weedy surface like subtropical flying-flowers.”

Both the earlier and the later descriptions of India’s countryside are familiar to me now, not just in literature but in my own personal memories.  While I did not make it to Kottayam itself, I saw God’s Own Country, as Kerala is known, from a tourist’s and a literary eye’s view.  It is a beautiful place, full of ripe fruit and lushness, and cultural collisions of every shape and size.  What I took from the trip was a deeper experience of my favorite novel, and also an antique oil lamp bought from the Kottayam family we befriended.  When we rubbed off the old varnish covering the darkened metal alloy, we discovered its convincing faux identity.  “1980” read the date carved into the bottom, between curling Malayam letters that only a Keralan will know. 

Auspicious Exit

Well, we did it.  We entered the New Year with a new plan and course of action.  By January 2nd, we were on our way to Bangalore, and early next week we’ll be on our way home.  It’s strange how quickly things move once you make a critical decision.  In this case, we were motivated mainly by health concerns, which when you get down to it, trumps everything else anyway.

Leaving a place always makes you appreciate it more, and makes you realize the quality of the connections you forged.  We had spent one night and morning packing up our belongings, and then the staff gathered around us to carry it all down to the car by the gate.  Maryamma, the cook, was there tearing up, and Kumar and Muthu and Ravi, the trio of strong men on the farm.  We said goodbye to Ravi’s wife Lakshmi and their toddler son Sebastian, who grabbed my finger with a two-toothed smile and then turned to hide his face behind his mother’s shoulder.  Their other son Augustine clung to the globe that Matt and I had just given him, after we pointed out where we were going, and how far it is from India.  The maverick Lakshman shook our hands and flashed his wide smile at us, red betel-stained lips framing shiny white teeth.  And Lauren, our partner in crime, our base of support, and our American community, who we were leaving behind.  Just as we were about to drive off, we leapt back out of the car and snapped one final picture, probably the only picture I have of Mojo Plantation’s staff.

In the car, we met Ganesh, our driver for the day, and began to rattle down the potholed road to Madikeri for the last time.  Ganesh turned up his Murugan Devotional Songs CD, and I settled into the ride, watching coffee and spice plantations blur past as the sitars and wailing Indian voices soothed me.  Along the way Ganesh hollered out the window and a flower-walla jogged up, throwing a rope of jasmine flowers into the car in exchange for a rupee or two.  Ganesh settled the pile of fragrant white petals around a statue of the elephant god, his namesake, mounted to his dashboard.

In Hindu etymology, Ganesh is the remover of obstacles.  He’s one of the most popular gods in South India, and it’s hard to avoid going a block or two in Bangalore without happening upon some likeness of him.  So it felt auspicious, getting a ride from Ganesh out of a place that had borne many challenges for me, propelling me in a new direction.  I hope I can carry that energy with me as we head home and into, in some ways, a greater unknown.