Thanksgiving Abroad

The first Thanksgiving I spent abroad, we were living in Tainan, Taiwan, and I was eleven years old. My dad, career air force, commanded a military installation and coordinated with the American-trained Republic of China Air Force. At the time, Chiang Kai-shek was still alive and head of the Kuomintang, which ruled Taiwan. Martial Law—not that I was aware of it—prevailed. Two women worked for my mom, keeping us fed and our house in order. Both were Taiwanese, and both refused to work whenever my parents threw parties that included Chinese guests. The elder of the two, a woman who ask us to call her Ann, suggested that the Japanese occupants, pre-WWII, had been better liked than the Chinese.

Days before that first Thanksgiving on the island, we received the delivery of a turkey, a gift from one of the ROCAF generals Dad worked with. It was a live bird. Ann installed it in the large, screened-in porch above our carport. A sturdy and no-nonsense woman (“housegirl” to our elitist, expat community), Ann found my insistence on keeping the creature as a pet, laughable. She didn’t hide her contempt when I gave it a name. (Oh, I cannot tell you the many and frequent ways I earned her contempt.) “There’s no way we’re going to eat it,” I said. I was sure my mom would agree.

Our house on Ta Tung Lu – the screened porch upper right.

On a Taipei outing with General and Mrs. Shan.

Dad knew turkeys well. “Dumbest creatures on the planet,” he’d say just about every Thanksgiving as Mom pulled a steaming, skin-crackling carcass out of the oven. During the Great Depression, his parents had raised turkeys for a little extra income and put him in charge of their keep. His experience, of course, was with the domesticated, white bird—quite unlike our scrawny porch guest with its long neck and brown feathers.

The day after the bird’s arrival, I rushed straight to the porch after school to find the space empty. “Where’s (bird’s name)?” I asked Ann, who’d followed me upstairs. She crossed her arms and said, “Your parents gave the turkey to Lee. He lives on a farm. The turkey is happy now. It lives in the country.” Lee was our gardener.

I’m sure I started to cry. I knew better than to believe the turkey would survive the chopping block.

On Thanksgiving, it was pure relief to see a fat Butterball turkey from the base commissary going into the oven.

Kaiserstuhl, Switzerland, twenty years later: Markus and I invited his family, thirteen adults and children to join us in giving thanks. Weeks earlier, I’d gone to the local butcher, located in a village a thirty-minute walk away, and asked if I could order a turkey. My request excited the butcher, a stylish man fashionably bespectacled; his wife, who worked alongside him, was equally stylish and fashionably bespectacled. “Of course!” he said. “When do you want to pick it up? It will be frozen, by the way. Is that okay?”

“No problem!” We agreed upon a date.

Because Thanksgiving isn’t a Swiss observance, there was no way to invite family over for a late Thursday afternoon meal; no one had the day off, so I scheduled a Saturday feast. There would be no (American) football to watch—actually, we didn’t own a TV, anyway—and I would be in charge of the whole meal. No one would be saying, “I’ll bring the mashed potatoes!,” “The broccoli in cheese sauce is on me!,” or “I make a killer pecan pie—my grandmother’s recipe. Interested?” Yes, yes, yes.

The butcher and his wife proudly presented me my frozen turkey. And, good grief, it was the real deal: a Butterball. I didn’t know it then, but it would be the last turkey I’d buy for my Thanksgivings abroad that included the giblets. Oh, how I’d plea for a neck and giblets to be included with all future, locally sourced birds; oh, every year’s disappointment. I quit buying birds from one farm because the farmer trimmed off the tail and all that flappy skin I needed to sew in my stuffing. I couldn’t convince the man to leave it on for me.

The Butterball purveyor, wrapping up my bird, said, “That’ll be two hundred and fifty Swiss francs, please.” In US dollars—I was still doing conversions in my head—my perfect turkey came in around $200.00. My knees buckled. Why hadn’t I asked the butcher how much he’d be charging me? What would Markus say to a bird worth its weight in gold?

He didn’t blink an eye, and a gorgeous, golden-brown bird came out of the oven. I presented it to the family Rockwellian style, placing it before Markus, seated at the head of the table. He stood, picked up the carving knife, and sawed off an entire leg. Holding it up, he said, “Who wants a leg?”

Well, how was he to know how to carve a bird in Thanksgiving style?

Thereafter, our Thanksgivings in Switzerland have been more international, with friends from the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Romania, and Switzerland. Some have grown up. Some have moved away. Some have passed away. We remain thankful for great meals, to have known those who are gone from our lives and those who continue to enrich them.

Polyglot Night

Looking down onto the house where Markus grew up, the Dumbach House and its attached barn, our rental, and the train crossing.

A summer night. The kids in bed. Our windows open. Lights dapple the pollarded chestnut trees of the Gartenwirtschaft across the street. Two teens occupy a bench at the train station visible from our living room window, and their conversation rises above the restaurant’s banter and laughter. The language they speak is Schwyzertüütsch, a Swiss-German dialect, lovely and lyrical.

A pollarded chestnut tree in Kaiserstuhl.

From her upstairs bedroom, our ten-year-old daughter shouts, “I can hear you!”

The teens immediately switch to French, which they learn in school.

It just so happens that we’ve only recently relocated here from a five-year stint in France, where our kids attended the local kindergarten and primary school. We had the chance to settle there but chose to return to Switzerland, to live close to my husband’s family. We’re renting next door to where my husband grew up. His parents live a block away, in a house they built after their retirement.

I go to the living room window and gesture to him to join me in eavesdropping on this exchange.

Our daughter usually falls asleep quickly, but within minutes of being asleep, she’ll be on her feet and sobbing, heading to the top of the stairs. One of us will always listen for her, fearful that she might trip over something or stumble down the stairs. One of us will go to her to offer comfort. We’ll lead her back to bed where she’ll promptly fall into a deep sleep that sees her through the night. Her two younger siblings, inured to this odd ritual, sleep on.

Recently, between hiccups of sobs, our sleepwalker expressed frustration about something being left undone. Without having any idea what it was, I said, “Oh, I finished that for you. Go to sleep, darling.”

“Really?” she said through sobbing hiccups, “It’s done?”

I said, “All done!”

Within days of this trick being employed, she stopped sleepwalking altogether; but that summer, her father and I were still habituated and attuned to listening for her somnambulate sobs and treads.

Fully awake now, though, she yells, “Je comprends français, aussi !”

The teens on the platform exchange looks of astonishment, their mouths open. One whispers something, and the other says, considerably louder, “Okay, then. English.”

View to our old house from the train station.

It just so happens, I’m from the States. I speak North American English with the kids. I’ve learned Schwyzertüütsch and French, but my accent falls harsh on native speaker ears. While we still lived in France, our daughter told a plumber, “Maman parle anglais parce qu’elle est anglaise. Papa parle allemand parce qu’il est allemand. Je parle français parce que je suis français.” I laughed. Wrong on three accounts.

Upstairs, our daughter shouts, “And I speak English, too! So, shut up!”

One of the teens cries, “Who are you?”

Our daughter, now grown, lives in LA. On a recent visit, she says, “Here, I feel so American. But there, I’m so Swiss.”

“Don’t fly back home over Charles de Gaulle,” I say.

She laughs—indeed, she will be, and probably feeling totally French.

Hot Summers

In June already, the fields around us had an August patina.

We kept our newly planted fig tree watered this summer and were rewarded with three ripe figs!

To those acclimated to Swiss summers, temperatures pushing 85°F (29.5°C) feels scorching. Usually, we reach such temperatures around mid-July, suffering for a maximum of three weeks. Even at their peak days, they’ll drop significantly at night. And we sleep restfully in such a respite.

North of the Alps, Swiss houses aren’t equipped with air conditioning. At worst, we suffer. At best, we cope with floor fans. The stay-at-home Swiss (-German) generally close their windows and shutters against the heat, opening them when the air starts to cool.  They’ll complain bitterly about being stuck all day in a dark and stuffy house.

I used to argue with former work colleagues about how to respond to summer heat. Our office building had no air conditioning. In the mornings, we’d open the windows to air out the place. I’d insist on keeping some open all day to encourage air circulation, which I considered critical to staying comfortable. Sure, we’d sweat, but at least we wouldn’t suffocate. I also advocated for the purchase of fans. To zero effect. My coworkers—and everyone else in the company—shut the windows and shutters around ten o’clock to “keep in the cool air.” Miserable. When I bought myself a desk fan, my coworkers complained of the draft it caused.

When I was growing up in the US and elsewhere—in places like Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Ohio, and even Taiwan—my parents didn’t consider the day hot until the mercury broke 100°F (37.7°C). I recall Mom claiming we’d catch cold if we went swimming before it reached 100°. They’d grown up in Central and West Texas. During a summer day—the heat lasting months rather than weeks—fans circulated the air around our house. In fact, the rumbling of fans felt as summery to me as bare feet, swimming lessons, and a fat watermelon chilling in a tub of ice.

While driving through the southwest deserts of the US, I introduced the kids to what travels had been like in the early 60s. No air conditioning: windows open. In the dry heat, we weren’t miserable until the mercury broke 107°F (41°C).

One summer in Switzerland, the temperatures weren’t dropping at night, and I longed for that childhood rumble and sweep of moving air. I bought a table fan and set it up in our room at bedtime. Markus said, “What’s this? That thing can’t run all night long.” On one hand, I can count the times he’s conceded that the fan’s hum and drift is easier to endure at night than any summer heat.

Nowadays, when I work alone in the house, two fans operate. One in the cellar pushes cool air up the stairwell, and an upstairs one keeps that cool air circulating. The temperatures broke 100° (37.7°C) this year. I cracked open a roof window, intending to create a chute to encourage the hot air to leave the house.

Did it work? Maybe.

But the buzzing fans readily returned me to a childhood sense of wellbeing. A great comfort.

The Swiss style of air conditioning is to head to water . . .

or the mountains.

The Unexpected

We’re in the dog days of a dry, dry summer. In late July, just after my birthday, we spent a week in the Alps where it’s cooler than in Kaiserstuhl. Much cooler. We returned to a desiccated lawn littered with brown and curled leaves fallen from the hazelnut and linden trees. We keep the rhododendrons and azaleas, along with my beds of wild strawberries, the roses, peonies, summer squash, calendula and snapdragons that are flowering, the cherry tree and red currant bush, and especially our newly planted fig tree, sufficiently watered. The rest of what remains green in our yard—the lavender, rosemary, sage, hibiscus, and table grapes—seems to have deep roots; our house sits on the edge of an aquifer.

The lavender are thriving despite the heat and lack of water.

Our young fig tree must think it’s rooted in an oasis.

When Markus was a boy, the fields between our town and the next village would flood in winter from the rising water table. When it froze, he and his friends would play hockey on the ice. These days, all the fields are too well drained to flood, and our kids never owned a pair of skates.

Before leaving for the Alps, I made a quick round of the blackberries I forage. They appeared to be ripening early. And I worried that I might miss them altogether while gone. Last year, due to our travels to the States, I’d missed the blackberry season. No pies. No crisps. No Muesli stained berry purple.

No fun.

Earlier this year, for the first time since discovering where the wild strawberries best grew, I skipped gleaning them. The plants that I had transferred to my own flowerbeds provide sufficient fruit to produce a supply of jam and sauce for scones, vanilla ice cream, and cheesecake—and bonus, I don’t have to worry about ticks as I harvest in my own garden. The wild white strawberries I transferred haven’t spread well enough to supply me with jars of jam. Some things take time to transfer and establish themselves. And the heat this summer is tough on my transplants. Luckily, I did start a home patch of the white berries when I did. The town landscaper has since turned his weed-eater onto the original patch, chopping away at least fifty percent of the fruit-bearing plants.

When I returned from the mountains, the fruit of the blackberry vines I’d scouted out before leaving resembled raisins. I harvested a total of three kilos from the patches that usually produce three kilos each. Nettles usually frustrate my work. Where the plumpest berries hang, the nettles usually grow vigorous and tall. This year, the nettles surviving are doing so by keeping close to the ground.

The air dry; the sun hot; sweat dripping down my face and the back of my knees; I retraced my steps, walking in the shade of deciduous trees. The leaves rustling sound like pouring grain. There are vines I leave for last. They grow along the shaded and blind edge of a Renaissance-type garden that belongs to a large villa on the outskirts of our town. In the best of years, they haven’t produced the best of berries, and the ditch they arc over is steeply sloped. At some point, someone hacked them back, filling the ditch with tentacles of slashed vines, the thorns made sharper by drying out. I’m always weary of making a wrong step and tumbling into the cruel cache of thorns.

The garden with the villa and Kaiserstuhl’s tower in the distance.

The gravel path where the blackberries grow.

The ditch I don’t want to fall into.

Hardly worth the trouble picking them. My basket felt too light, but what could such vines produce in a dry year, anyway? How much weight would they add?

Yet I came upon the shaded and gently winding path of red gravel that lead to them. Too welcoming to pass by—especially as my walk home along the railroad tracks simmered under a glaring sun.

And what did I find? Vines thick with berries twice the size of what I’d already collected, their drupelets fat and glossy. Wholly unexpected. I quickly filled my basket. In this dry year, the renaissance garden is being well irrigated, and the vines have profited. And so, have I.

Fat boys from the vines with access to water.

This morning’s pick. Plenty for jam-making . . .

. . . or a “berry fine” smoothie for breakfast.

Too often, the places where we expect to find disappointment enchant us instead.

Monarch Story

A Gulf Fritillaries nectaring on a passionflower in Mom’s butterfly friendly garden in Central Texas.

In June, I flew home to visit my mom, brother, and sister-in-law, who all live in La Grande, Oregon. An unusually cool spring had produced an abundance of wildflowers. We went out to see the camas turning marshy fields periwinkle blue, the buttery-yellow lupines climbing up grassy slopes, and clusters of spotlight-yellow balsamroot, the “Oregon sunflower,” dotting pastures.

Balsamroot, the “Oregon sunflower,” yellow lupines, and the splendor of camas out at Ladd Marsh.

On the first warm, sunny day of my visit, Mom and I puttered about in her charming backyard, weeding and checking on her snow peas and raspberries. She had plans for landscaping her yard, to turn it into an oasis of native plants, especially those that attract butterflies, which got us talking about milkweeds and the monarchs.

Last year, Mom was still living in Central Texas where she’d had a butterfly garden. She’d grown up in Texas, moving about a bit, from Austin, where she was born, to College Station where her daddy did graduate work at Texas A&M, and then on to San Angelo and Fort Worth. “In San Angelo,” she said, “there was an empty lot close to our house that was covered with milkweed. When I walked through the lot, hundreds of monarchs would take flight.”

One day, when she was about seven, she noticed someone driving a tractor with a mower attachment onto the lot. “I ran home,” she said, “and shouted to my mother that the milkweeds and monarchs were in danger. Mother dropped everything and ran with me back to the lot, dragging along my little sister. We began collecting caterpillars and milkweed leaves as fast as we could.” The man on the tractor understood what they were doing. “He graciously cut his engine. And we collected all the caterpillars we could find, plenty of leaves to keep them fed, and dug up some milkweed, too, to replant in our garden.”

Mom in San Angelo.

Within days, the caterpillars they’d collected and taken home reached the stage where they went crawl-about to pupate. “Soon, chrysalises covered our kitchen ceiling,” Mom said with a chuckle, “which didn’t please the woman who helped Mom around the house. She said ‘I’m not working for anybody who breeds worms! I quit!’”

Nowadays, more than ever, we need as many people as possible willing to stop mowers and breed “worms.” People willing to plant butterfly gardens and promote native plants.

Mom’s homegrown monarch caterpillars. These photos were taken in her Central Texas garden – let’s hope she’ll be growing more in her Eastern Oregon home by next summer!

Literary License

The University of Oregon novel-writing class with our instructor Ken Kesey. Photo credit: ©Brian Lanker.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a grad student living in Eugene, Oregon, I participated in a novel-writing course with Ken Kesey, author of several novels, including Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He asked us to organize a reading in town for a visiting poet. The poet, an Australian, read his from work and Kesey read from Demon Box, his collection of essays and short stories.

One of Kesey’s pieces was set on his farm, where his son Jed was buried, the Merry Prankster bus Further sat in shocking decay in a marshy coppice, and where an unshorn sheep grazed—bringing the phrase “grass maggot” to mind. His story involved a butcher’s visit to the farm. I’d seen Kesey’s farm and cattle, and easily pictured their tansy-infested field. After the man had done his butchery, packed up, and left, the remaining cows gathered, so the story went, to encircle the bloodied tree where the ill-fated cow had been slaughtered.

Really? The story had me sitting straight up in my front-row seat.

Back when I’d still lived at home with my parents in rural Oregon, my bedroom window looked out over our horse pastures and those of our neighbor’s that adjoined them. He had cows that grazed alongside his horses. One day, a van drove to a cluster of trees close to the fence between our properties, our neighbor following on foot. The two men singled out a cow, roped it, and led it to a tree. The cow began to bellow. The others ignored it. The butcher hog-tied the bellowing animal, shot it, strung it up, and bled it out. The mobile butcher proceeded to gut and butcher the cow’s steaming carcass. He wrapped cuts of meat in white wax paper, and ground up pounds of trimmings and whatnot destined to be patted into burgers or cooked into spaghetti Bolonese.

The next day, some boys on the school bus bragged about getting ahold of the butchered cow’s head and leaving it in someone’s mailbox. Along our country roads, folks used barrels for receiving large packages. And surprises. The boys all had a good laugh imagining some poor soul fetching the mail and discovering a cow’s head staring blankly at them.

Those boys got ahold of that cow’s head repeatedly, depositing it in various barrels up and down our road over several weeks.

Imagine the state of that head over a length of time; I was sure glad we didn’t have a postal barrel.

What got me sitting rigid in my chair at Kesey’s reading was his description of his cows responding to the death of their herd mate. Having witnessed the butchering of our neighbor’s cow, it’d struck how unperturbed the other cows had been. Once their herd mate had been roped, they’d returned to grazing, looking as dumbly unconcerned by the cruel, cruel world as ever. And once the butcher had left the field? Did the herd gather in a circle around the bloody tree? Mourn the fallen?

No.

I went up to Kesey after his reading, and said, “About that butcher story and the cows gathering to grieve—”

Kesey’s deep chuckle didn’t let me finish. “Oh, that,” he said, his eyes curing up like an imp’s, “yeah. I’ve gotten a lot of grief over that piece.” He wrapped one of his beefy arms around me and pulled me closer to his barrel chest. I could smell peppermint schnapps on his breath. “Lots of folks call out the bullshit on that one.” More chuckles (the best sounding chuckles I’ve ever known). He fished his flask of schnapps out of his vest pocket and offered it to me. “Literary license, ya know?”

A photo I took of the People Magazine article about the novel-writing class that appeared in 1988.

Literary License

The University of Oregon novel-writing class with our instructor Ken Kesey. Photo credit: ©Brian Lanker.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a grad student living in Eugene, Oregon, I participated in a novel-writing course with Ken Kesey, author of several novels, including Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At a reading we’d organized as a class, he read from Demon Box, his collection of essays and short stories.

One of the pieces he read was set on his farm where his son Jed was buried, the Merry Prankster bus Further sat in shocking decay in a marshy coppice, where an unshorn sheep grazed—bringing the phrase “grass maggot” to mind—and where several cattle chewed their cud in a tansy-infested field. He told the story of a butcher’s visit to the farm and how, after the butcher had done his butchery, packed up, and left, the remaining cows gathered, encircling the bloodied tree where the ill-fated cow had been slaughtered.

Really? The story had me sitting straight up in my front-row seat.

Back when I’d still lived at home with my parents in rural Oregon, my bedroom window looked out over our horse pastures and the adjoining pastures that belonged to our neighbor. Several of his cows grazed his pastures along with his horses. One day, a van drove across his pasture to a cluster of trees close to the property line and our house . The driver and our neighbor singled out a cow, roped it, and led it to a tree where they hog-tied the bellowing animal, shot it, strung it up, and bled it out. The mobile butcher proceeded to gut and butcher the cow’s steaming carcass.

The next day, some boys on the school bus bragged about getting ahold of the butchered cow’s head and leaving it in someone’s mailbox. Along our country roads, folks used barrels for receiving large packages. And surprises. The boys all had a good laugh imagining some poor soul fetching the mail and discovering a cow’s head staring blankly at them.

Over the following weeks, those boys somehow got ahold of that cow’s head repeatedly, depositing in various barrels up and down our road over several weeks.

Imagine the state of that head over a length of time; I was sure glad we didn’t have a postal barrel.

As I listened to Kesey tell the tale of the mobile butcher’s visit to his farm, my experience came back to me. And what got me sitting rigid in my chair was his description of how his cows reacted to the death of their herd mate—because one of the things that had struck me as I’d witnessed the butchering of our neighbor’s cow, was precisely how unperturbed his other cows had been. Once their herd mate had been roped, they returned to grazing, looking as dumbly unconcerned by the cruel, cruel world as ever.

And once the butcher had left the field? Did the herd gather in a circle around the bloody tree? Mourn the fallen?

No.

Kesey finished his reading, and I said to him, “About that butcher story and the cows gathering to grieve—”

I didn’t finish my sentence, Kesey’s deep chuckle interrupting me. “Oh, that,” he said, his eyes curing up like an imp’s, “yeah. I’ve gotten a lot of grief over that piece.” He wrapped one of his beefy arms around me and pulled me closer to his barrel chest. I could smell peppermint schnapps on his breath. “Lots of folks call out the bullshit on that one.” More chuckles (the best sounding chuckles I’ve ever known). He fished his flask of schnapps out of his vest pocket and offered it to me. “Literary license, ya know?”

A photo I took of the People Magazine article about the novel-writing class that appeared in 1988.

Tra La!

May’s riot of azaleas always reminds me of living in North Carolina a long time ago.

Tra la, it’s here, the lusty month of May! That lovely month—when I never go astray. Annually, I post a song from the musical Camelot on social media, switching between the Julie Andrews and Vanessa Redgrave versions. I remember playing the album of the 1960 musical, seeing the 1967 movie, and being besotted by all the major stars and their voices.

We lived in North Carolina when the movie came out. My parents took us to see it as well as a traveling stage production performed on base. I fell in love with the stage Lancelot. Dear Lancelot. The purity of his heart deceived him when couldn’t stop himself from loving King Arthur’s queen in a manner inappropriate for a vassal.

As we exited the dark theater into daylight, I sighed and expressed my love for Lance. “Wasn’t he handsome?” I said.

“But he was bald,” my mom said.

But what did that matter? He was Lancelot! And, like my dad, a military man.

Celebrating my 8th birthday on our back deck in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

In North Carolina, we lived in a neighborhood close to Andrews AFB where Dad was stationed. Fort Bragg, the largest Army base in the country overshadowed it. One of our neighborhood streets dead-ended where the army training fields began, and we loved watching the soldiers, tanks, and heavy guns traveling between training fields and base, churning up clouds of the pink dust from the red Carolina soil.

Both bases swarmed with young men in uniform. We, as military brats, lived in a world disproportionately populated with men. Uniforms, youth, and vitality surrounded us. Meanwhile, news of Vietnam battlefields and war protests from around the country raged on TV and in the papers. And my best friend’s father came home from the war in a coffin. The last year we lived in North Carolina, we lived without my dad, who was serving a year tour of duty in Vietnam.

My dad in Saigon, 1968.

For most, Camelot will forever be associated with the Kennedy presidency. But for me, it will always be tied to red clay dust and the Vietnam War, when I learned to gaze at the human race aghast.

Secondhand Treasures

Several months after I finished graduate school, I cleared out my apartment, giving treasures away, boxing up what I wanted to keep, and selling the rest at a yard sale. Not that I’d owned much, but possessing less felt refreshing, and I recalled a former roommate who owned only what he could pack into his green 1969 Rambler. I also recalled his favorite possession, something I’d found for him at a yard sale, a coffee machine with a clock. He could set it to brew minutes before his alarm went off. He’d step out of his room, hot coffee waiting. Another roommate in that same house had worked as a seamstress for the San Francisco Opera Company. She’d bring home sacks of clothing she’d harvested from the overstuffed racks at Goodwill and St. Vincent de Paul’s. Elbow deep in castoffs, she’d rip apart seams and reshape the old, removing bulky shoulder pads, shortening hems, or adding borders reminiscent of Seminole patchwork patterns. Sometimes, she’d tie-dye her cotton finds—or reverse-dye them.

Much of what I sold at my yard sale had been bought at yard sales. I prized a 1920’s floor lamp which a pleated silk shade. The owners had been given it as a wedding present, and they sold it to me with tears in their eyes. They were being moved into a retirement facility, downsizing. I’d transformed other pieces—a table, coffee table, and sideboard—with licks of paint and stencil work. We didn’t use the term “upcycling” then, but that was what I was doing. When I cleared out my apartment, I gave away my stenciled furniture to a friend who’d admired my work.

Sadly, the Swiss don’t hold yard sales. And they don’t really do bargains. Certainly not like North Americans do. The rare “flea markets” come closest to our yard sales, but the best places to find secondhand treasures in the German-speaking parts of Switzerland are the Brokis. The prices in these thrift shops would shock any bargain-hunting North American, but I’ve made peace with them. Had to.

When furnishing our first apartment, my husband and I trawled the Brokis. We found a pair of handmade beds made of Arve, Swiss pine. Most likely, they’d originated in the Alps. My father-in-law, an amateur furniture maker, claimed the set to be the handiwork of someone skilled but not professional. When we moved to France, we adopted most of the furniture that’d belonged to my husband’s grandmother. The family had planned to haul it all to their local Brocki until we stepped in. The grandmother’s father had been a furniture maker, and the household of furniture had been his wedding gift. Giggling like pirates, Markus and I made off with a booty: the dining and main bedroom sets. Solid oak.

The 1920’s family piece that I hope stays in the family.

Other treasures we’ve gleaned from Brokis include four paintings. Two were painted by artists renowned for their work as graphic designers, W. F. Burger, of a view to the Italian border on Lago di Lugano and a 1945 pastoral scene by Arthur Emil Bofinger. One is by K. Jordi, a skilled watercolorist I find no online information about, and another is a naïve work of a WWI German war scene. The naïve piece could hang in the Museum of Bad Art; nevertheless, I love it.

I’m certain former owners would be surprised to find their old treasures in my possession. Who knows where each will find themselves next? And our daughter in Los Angeles? She can’t wait to trawl LA’s secondhand shops with us.

An Imagination

If only you could focus. If you’d only concentrate.

A child sits shackled to a classroom desk. A heating pipe pings and plonks, becoming either water torture or a lure. The child examines the pipe. Discovering it’s a tunnel, she crawls inside. It takes her down, below the floor, through dark corridors, and under ground. She emerges in a leafy woods, where, through the trees, she sees a procession of people dressed in black, the men in sleek-black top hats and the women in long skirts, their heads adorned in feathers. They follow a black carriage, windowed and lit and encasing a coffin. Black horses with trembling plumes on their heads pull the carriage. The driver gentles their reins. The animals see the child. One calls her name. Panicked by being spotted, she runs back to the tunnel, slipping under ground and up dark corridors. Her name’s called again. She’s gasping for breath, and before she reaches her seat, there’s laughter. The teacher’s hand presses itself white-knuckled on the child’s desk. Her name is called again—as sharply as the whack of a ruler.

If only you could focus. If you’d only concentrate.

A window beckons. Outside, the wind is up. A hedge of bushes and trees, bright green with spring growth, sways. The new leaves twinkle as if they’re daytime stars, and the branches beckon. A corner of the window peels back to reveal a carpet, which she settles upon. Closing her eyes, she leans back. The air is fresh, uplifting. She smiles. Below, far, far below, there’s laughter. The carpet hovers. She hears a name, her name, a whack—

If only you could focus. If you’d only concentrate.

Beneath her desk, a crack in the floor catches the sole of her shoe. She presses against the crack, and it slides open, a draft of salty air enveloping her. Seagulls scream, and waves slap against a breakwater. A galleon’s docked. Against the wishes of her teacher, who insists she to pay closer attention in class, she climbs aboard. She may sail to parts unknown, and be wrecked upon an island like Robinson Crusoe. Unlike him, won’t seek company or a return to society. She’ll make a life for herself on the island. The only Friday she needs falls at the end of the week. Today might be Friday.

If only you could focus. If you’d only concentrate.

If only you could focus. If you’d only concentrate.

Friday. The child is given assignments for the weekend. Some are okay, maybe, but the math assignments clink like chains. Never mind. Chains remind her of bikes, which takes her out the family compound, up a narrow alley stinking of open benjos, past farmyards with crowing roosters, murmuring ducks, and bellowing water buffalo. She pedals past a wooden hay cart pulled by a Brahman cow and slips between glinting rice paddies. A solitary Buddhist temple, its roof of tiles glazed in a rainbow of colors and adorned with wings of dragons glimmers. And through a copse of pines, she pushes her bike along a boardwalk. The beach. The South China Sea. Waves sweep ashore. Kids swimming in the surf call her into the water where she just may swim around the world.

The American beach near Tainan in the 1970s (photo posted on a FB group page by Jack Flash)

A little dreamer with her dad and General & Mrs. Shan on an outing to Sun Moon Lake.

Who says this girl cannot focus, cannot concentrate? Look at how far she travels. Look at how far she’s come.

Why not feed curiosity? Free the wandering mind? Follow the urge to explore?

A girl with an imagination in Obergoms, Switzerland