Jerry left me in Boulder with a tiny kitchen and dishes for one. He shopped at a local culinary fun house (which I’ve yet to explore) and found a pretty set of new chopsticks, Japanese style, with bright red tops and little yellow squiggle designs. But only one pair.
Only one set of chopsticks, on purpose. Though we’ll both be traveling to and fro in the next 8 months, I am, for all practical purposes, on this particular journey alone. I’m only one week into it, and I’m discovering my comforts and annoyances. Things I’m happy to have, others I miss. I’ve been taking mental notes from a largely ecological perspective. In no particular order, these are
THINGS I LOVE:
- This open-minded, educated, forward-thinking community. Its brain jibes with mine.
- Trails. Everywhere—for feet and wheels. All I do to find the view below is head half a block downhill, turn left past the nature center, and there it is: covered in myriad paths up and into and around the Flatirons. Heading there right now with my coffee….
- Drivers, who more or less are courteous to the cyclists and pedestrians who—almost—dominate Boulder’s roads.
- Fitness. I thought I was in reasonable shape (and I know I am). Yet I sputter in the wake of so many pro and nearly-so runners, bikers, hikers and all-around athletes who scale these mountains with barely a breath. But I’ll get closer—I’m walking or cycling everywhere these days.
- The Boulder Farmers’ Market, a beautiful sprawling tapestry of fresh foods and colors, accessible by bike (it’s right on the Boulder Creek Path, another new commuter’s love).
- The Chautauqua Dining Hall, a first-class restaurant one block out my door. Huge wrap-around porch, the perfect place for a glass of wine and sunset. (Plus, residents get 10 percent off!)
- So many restaurants and pubs with live music and general liveliness all around. Welcome back to college!
- And last but definitely not least, the Scripps program, one of the greatest contributions imaginable to journalism and the environment today.
The Flatirons, from Chautauqua
THINGS I MISS:
- My husband, of course. Family and friends. Remember the song, “Make new friends, but keep the old….”
- My big, open kitchen with room to maneuver and the appropriate dish or utensil for every idea in my cook’s mind.
- New Mexico food, wine and beer prices. Period.
- The ability to buy all of the above at one store.
- Perea Farms, El Mezquite, Valencia Fresh Fruteria, my neighborhood farmers’ market, fresh tortillas made daily, honey and eggs for sale around the corner, the scent of roasting chiles in the air everywhere this time of year. I know the local food scene has a lot to offer Boulder, and I have much to explore. But I do miss the down-to-earth nitty-gritty feel of food plucked straight from the dirt—a benefit of living so close to so many farms.
- My garden. Right now, right this very minute, I am missing loads of grapes, peaches, tomatoes, eggplants, chiles, chard, collards and arugula.
- My herbs. It’s a jungle out there among the dozen basil plants, oregano, onions, chives, parsley, sage, thyme, tarragon, marjoram, rosemary and mint. I’ve bought a few little plants for my Boulder porch (below), but I no longer have the option of chopping down a bundle of onions or a heap of basil and mint for a proper batch of laap.
- Dark and quiet. Previous residents have raved about Chautauqua’s peaceful nature. But I’m spoiled, already having the experience of living and staying in some of the world’s most serene locations. I’m liking my cozy cottage quite well, but this park is a tourist destination and a favorite of anyone in hiking boots. I get foot traffic through my little yard all the time. At home in New Mexico, I almost never need to close the drapes. Here, I feel just a bit as though I’m living in a glass house.
- Patio dining. Cooler nights spell perfect times for BBQs. Miss that.
Small herb garden in the making
AND A FEW RANDOM ECOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS:
- My graduate-level environmental studies class watched a video clip of Rachel Carson this week. The last time I’d seen similar footage was in Burma for an Earth Day celebration last year. Here, 20 percent of the class had never heard of Rachel Carson.
- Laundry. I’m actually less efficient living alone because I brought few clothes. I’m having to wash smaller loads more often. The machines here are not ENERGY STAR, and I can’t adjust for load size. Plus, I have no laundry line, which means I’m using the dryers.
- Garbage. I’m tossing more, more often because Chautauqua does not yet have composting facilities (we’re told they’re coming soon!). At home, we are able to compost or recycle almost all our waste. Some weeks, we have but one little bag in the trash can. Since I’m also tossing food scraps here, I’m having to take out the garbage more frequently because of the smell.
- Attitude. Despite the notes above, it’s a given in Boulder—people consider the environment in their daily actions. Bags aren’t immediately given in stores. Shops everywhere sell organic, biodegradable, compostable items. (Just bought a biodegradable plastic file folder.) Living green is the community norm.
- Cooking for one. Either I must change my habits, or I’ll have to start giving daily dinner parties. After so many years of cooking for at least myself and a hungry husband, it’s hard now to think and shop in terms of one. I can’t believe how long a single dish lasts—through the next breakfast, lunch, dinner and beyond. Must. Think. Small.
Many people have asked me what it was like to weed through a life that had been stowed for six years. Six years! Life, locked up and left alone. How did I feel?
Mostly I felt sneezy and itchy. In Oregon, six years in a metal room means mold. And mice. And dust. All those allergens quickly brought my throat and nose to attention with memories of why I love and hate the Pacific Northwest – love the immaculate summers, hate the sodden winters.
But seriously, how did I feel, tearing open boxes and sifting through so much stuff from such a long time ago? To be honest, it was a quick culling in the chilly parking lot of that storage place. We had business to do in Portland. We had a schedule to maintain. Though frequently sidetracked by old letters and photos and books, we remained largely focused on the primary task with one deciding question: Should it stay or should it go? Sometimes a simple question (all those old, baggy sweaters I would never wear again). But other times, it hurt just a little. That fine set of nonstick cookware, given as wedding gifts? Out they went. I’m aware of the debate, but I have chosen to take no chances. The old TV – out. Too many store-bought tchotchkes – out. Old running shoes? Out, out, out. And so, with the help of Jerry’s father, we loaded the car again and again, carving a path between that parking lot and Goodwill. So many little fragments of our past lives, now sitting on a shelf in a store or somebody else’s home. (And I’m aghast to think that somebody somewhere in Oregon accidentally ended up with a beautiful handmade cloth Tibetan door, which I had fully intended to hang in my New Mexico office! May it hang in peace, wherever it is.)
It wasn’t until we arrived home and started prying open the keeper boxes that memories really flowed. It’s a little weird for me to fixate on things, to focus all these words on inanimate stuff. But here I will gush a little because I do love our books…
… most of which still sit in boxes in the unfinished room on the south side. We simply have no space (yet) for the extent of our beloved, eclectic library. And music?
There is sublime pleasure in having all of one’s music — from blues to jazz to classical to big band to rock — in one spot. I think this privilege is not fully enjoyed until one goes away for a very long time.
And art. Oh, we have art…
… carried across long, rugged miles in cardboard tubes and PVC pipe; on buses and trains and planes. That picture in black and white and yellow? I remember the artist, an older Vietnamese man who sold paintings out of a little closet of a shop in Hanoi’s French Quarter. I think he asked about $25 for this. Of course, we paid four times that much in framing…
Even more to have this print of Dao women properly adorned. But what price art? We had met Dao villagers up near the Chinese border. We had attended a wedding, eaten their food. And then to find this print, with colors and stories that blend so well with the rug we eventually purchased in India, the painted metal trunk from Tibet, the pillows from Thailand – as though they were all meant to be together in our living room. In our minds.
And dishes, I do adore my blue-and-white dishes collected over the years in Cambodia, Vietnam and Japan….
My favorite fish bowls…
… and serving platters.
And teapots! A teapot for every mood…
… a bowl for every occasion. Same with glass…
… even the (slightly) radioactive remnants of my grandmother’s Great Depression years. Or the proper topper for an opened bottle of wine…
… a gift from a friend’s mother, who knew I had an admiration for pigs.
Someday soon, I shall tell you more about the world’s sharpest knives….
But I’ve gone on long enough now. I’m really not much of one to dwell on the insensate objects that fill our home, or anybody’s home. And I guess that’s the answer to the original question: What was it like, going through so many years of stuff?
Interesting, surely. But in the end, this was not nearly the emotive task I thought it might have been. Or could have been. (Although I really like the blender. And lamps, lamps are good. And I find the vacuum highly useful – I mean, just think how much cleaner our Thai condo could have been with a little machine to suck up all the dirt!) But generally speaking, things don’t inspire visceral reactions, not nearly so much as, say, watching the moon rise above the trees in our backyard, as the calendar turned to spring. Or waking to a plate of hot cornbread, cooked by my husband, as sunlight streamed through the eastern window. This sun, it happens every morning, as long shadows are cast across the kitchen table, across all those dishes I do love.
But it’s not the dishes so much as the moment. It’s not the music and books so much as the thoughts and ideas they inspire.
It’s not the stuff, so much as the people who made the stories around them.
Have I told you about these bowls? I don’t think I have, althouth some of you may have heard me talk about them in another venue. The contents of these bowls are not so remarkable (though tasty—stir-fried tofu with miso, cabbage with ginger and garlic). What’s intriguing is the story of how these bowls came to be.
A simple story, really.
A tragic story.
We bought these bowls in Laos. They’re aluminum, handmade by a blacksmith. They came from a heap of war scrap. Most likely, before these bowls came to life as kitchenware, this metal was used in the fuel drop tank of a US bomber.
You find war scrap and bomb scrap all across Laos. You find people with live bombs buried in their backyards. You find kids with detectors in hand, searching for metal in dangerous fields. You find US Army spoons. You find chemical bombs stamped with the name of the US state in which they were made.
And you find blacksmiths who turn all that scrap into practical, useful tools.
A while back, I wrote a short story for Orion about a Hmong man in Laos who makes tools from bomb scrap. Many of his customers are Hmong-Americans who order knives and hoes for their garden work. And so the blacksmith mails those tools back to the United States, to the likely origin of all that metal.
An American bomb detonates on Laotian soil. Thirty years later, a villager exhumes the pieces and delivers them to a scrap metal yard. There they sit in a heap until Lee Moua, a Hmong man, plunks down a little money for a mangled chunk.
He takes the metal to his homemade blacksmith shop in a parched backyard among pineapples and sugarcane. He fires a bed of coals, working beneath a rusty roof on a bamboo frame. His bellows are made from a parachute flare canister, his anvil is an artillery shell driven into a stump. Moua heats and pounds his bomb fragment, toiling most of a sweltering afternoon.
When he finishes his work, he has a silvery object, straight from a blistering fire. Its blade is wicked sharp, capable of practical things. It is a simple creation really: a garden hoe.
Between 1964 and 1973, the United States pummeled Laos with bombs, 580,000 sorties, an average of one raid every eight minutes for nine years. It was a secret war, an offshoot of Vietnam, directed at the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The US government bombed these central plains of Xieng Khouang province to smithereens, killing soldiers, farmers, children. At least 350,000 Laotian civilians died; some estimates are much higher.
People still die every week. By some estimates, up to 30 percent of those bombs never detonated, and they remain embedded in Laotian soil. Farmers die while plowing their fields. Women die while tending their yards. Children die while playing with little objects they pluck from the ground – cluster bombs, which were packed by the hundreds into canisters that opened midair, raining fist-sized “bombies” upon the earth. Today, every day, Laotians uncover those little bombs from roadsides, schoolyards, farm fields and village homes.
Laotians try to make use of all that perilous scrap. They risk their lives collecting metal. They sell it. They fashion the pieces into constructive objects.
Many Hmong who resettled overseas after the war still like to use traditional gardening tools, so they place orders with Lee Moua. He smiths knives and hoes for twenty or thirty dollars. For fifteen dollars more, he wraps them up and mails them to the United States. Bit by bit, bombs travel back to America to help vegetables and flowers grow.
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Welcome to my ramblings on food, drink, travel, politics, history and all the other avenues that converge in life. I’m a journalist, author and media trainer; and for five years I was Gourmet's Asia correspondent until the magazine's recent closure. I’m a bit obsessive in the kitchen. Much like my mother, I start thinking about dinner well before breakfast….
My books:
