Practicing

We left Latvia with much less ceremony and much more baggage than what we’d arrived with years earlier. A huge container had been loaded up and brought to the Port of Riga ready to cross the Atlantic. It would arrive in New York in about a month's time and then trucked to Chicago a few weeks after that. We moved to Chicago early in January, 2000 with two kids, four suitcases, Sissy’s big German stroller, and a Pack & Play. So much for 100 pounds of home.

I remember sitting in a restaurant at Gatwick airport the day we “moved.” London was our layover and we had many hours to kill. I don’t think I’d slept in days, the kids were antsy and feeding off of my unsure nerves, and all this tension was coming to a head. Gatwick felt like purgatory.

Jims' Godmother, Aunt Lisa (now London Lisa), who had just months before moved from Riga to Chicago herself, met us at O'Hare after we had travelled about 24 hours and scooped us up. Lisa will tell you that she isn't the nurturing type, but she mothered me and the kids perfectly right then (my husband never needed mothering--just ask his mother). She was sympathetic as our comforting link of familiarity from our suddenly-vanished life in Latvia; she had long, tight arms especially for Jims who needed to be around someone happier than I was; and for me she had a sister's searing look of strength mixed with slight irritation that said, "Come on, Maren pull it together...!"

Everything had turned into a frenetic scramble inside me and I was all at once amazed and aggravated that the effects of what we were doing, what we uprooted, didn’t seem to bother my husband one way or another. It didn’t feel right to me, but then nothing did, so as any good designer should do, I began rearranging my black to balance out his pastels and florals. I was practicing, trying to turn my tension into something more interesting and hopefully practical.

Tension as a Tool

This particular part of the story feels very long and drawn out to me. Stupidly, I’m just remembering that this period of time was long and drawn out! This process of moving to the US was tedious, gut wrenching in many ways, and just downright laborious. It was wrought with tension.

My husband was a Peace Corps Volunteer. At a close of service conference he attended after two years in Latvia, the volunteers were told to be prepared for culture shock when moving back home. They spewed off a statistic that said something like, for every six months you’ve spent in the field, expect it to take one month to readjust to life in America. For us at that point, this readjustment time amounted to about a year. At first I didn’t buy it—I’m not someone who lets a lot of grass grow under my feet (another gift from Winnie), but I had this terrible anxiety at my growing task list and growing “unknowns” list, and I was beginning to get the point. An inner tension prevailed and was getting stronger by the day.

The thing about tension is this: I think a little is a very good thing. Nothing worthwhile I’ve ever done seems to come without a dose of it, and I come to expect it—often even welcome it—when I work at something that’s important to me. It’s the thing that shows contrast. It’s the thing that makes the mundane or the tedium all of a sudden a bit more interesting. A little is a very good thing.

I liken it to putting a room together—there needs to be some tension as a stabilizer or a grounding. It actually makes a space feel more comfortable. Think of when you would visit your old Aunt Florence (I had two of them, I know…). You would likely enter her living room and be stared at by generations of photographs in glimmering silver frames sitting atop a round piece of glass which tacked down a piece of floral chintz. Then a petite settee in another fancy pattern of matching tones would beckon you to come keep the needlepoint pillow company. These are the same flavor as the curtains, as the lampshade, as the rug, as the Florentine foot on the sofa table, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this, the coordination evokes softness, peacefulness, bygone eras, and Aunt Florence’s folly, yet it’s UNCOMFORTABLE!

Enter blessed TENSION! Throw some BLACK mats under those silver picture frames! Replace the mauve throw draped over the chair with a vibrant PURPLE one! Toss the chintz doily and let the glass top rest DIRECTLY on the rich mahogany round side table. Break it up! Add some TENSION and suddenly, flowers and pastels are actually appealing. Everything is more interesting when given room to breathe.

I often find the same irritation when entering the ladies room in nice hotels and restaurants. The overworked décor is simply agitating. It’s all very pretty and serene, but I can’t hike up my tights fast enough to get out of there! It needs an infusion of the unexpected. Tension equals relief.

…Until there’s too much. Then there’s chaos.

The Life Chronological

I will note my absence from posting by letting you know that all these events happened exactly ten years ago this December. It’s a lot for me to take in, and realize, and write about! In the last entry I wrote about not knowing what had hit me, and this is true, but I was reacting to a sense of duty and didn’t have time to be dogmatic or even thoughtful about it.

Wallace Stegner, in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Angle of Repose, tells the story of a grandmother’s remarkable life as explained by her grown and physically impaired grandson. When I first read it while living in Latvia, everything resonated with me, and if you know the book, the reasons why are obvious. Stegner writes,

“My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making the new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents’ side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.”

This is exactly how I sold this lifestyle change to myself—that it was my generational and marital duty to pull up my skirts and get on with the business of moving forward.

The care that I took creating a home out of nothing in these Latvian flats was all to be left behind. The heart and work I put into building the Jaunmarupe house—designing my first kitchen, engineering the layout of gorgeous Villeroy & Boch tiles, standing over the guy with mortar and glass block making sure he built a shower wall exactly to my specifications, painting every single room myself, measuring and creating a design with the hundreds of balusters in the loft so little people wouldn’t slip through (although little Sissy did manage to get her head stuck during Thanksgiving dinner…), arranging our precious few belongings including our gorgeous antiques I’ve described within the walls built specifically to fit them—all to leave behind. Who can afford to believe in the “life existential” anyway.

Leaving

Now that we’ve segued through Thanksgiving, on with the story: I don’t think it ever really HIT me that we were leaving Latvia. We just built this house, our lives were comfortable, we knew how to manage living there, and life there seemed to just get better and better. It all happened so fast, though, and there was so much to do, I never really had time to process it.

We had a month before my husband started his new job in Chicago, and we were still on vacation in Florida! He had to resign from his current job, we had to figure out how to get a shipping container to move from Latvia to Chicago, figure out where we were going to live in Chicago, figure out what to do with our house and car and other things we couldn’t/didn’t want to take with us, get medical records and vital documents in order, I had to tie up loose ends of projects I was involved in, say our goodbyes, the list went on and on and there simply wasn’t time to ponder anything. We just had to do it.

That month was one of the scariest, busiest and most surreal times in my life. Nothing about it felt right, but there was little I could do to argue the plan. The String of Tension had apparently thickened its hold again, and cooperation and infallible union seemed to me to be the only remedy for easing it.

Thanksgiving

Interrupting the story again to touch on Thanksgiving. How can I not? I think Thanksgiving is a very creative holiday, definitely a part of my process, and certainly should count here.

Growing up, my holidays were probably much like yours: Lots of family gathered around one big dining table, a few satellite tables nearby, and the obligatory kiddo table. There were always at least two gigantic birds, enough other food to feed small African nations, happy spirits of the soulful and liquid variety, lovely tables set, scenic outdoor images from the windows of the candle and fireplace glow inside, and usually a slack handful of otherwise dinnerless friends/boyfriends/fiancés of my relatives. This is what Rockwell had in mind.

Christmas seems to hold more tradition in both the American sense and of course the religious sense, and although Thanksgiving is strictly American and traps tradition, it’s somehow looser. This was made evident to me during our time in Lativa. Those were the very best Thanksgivings.

Truth told, although our American clan I’ve written about before looked for any excuse to get together, Thanksgiving was special. It meant sharing in an intentional way our heritage, our nostalgia, and of course, our thankfulness.

Finding a turkey was always part of the anticipation. That generally started in September. Turkeys weren’t raised in the Baltics, Polish turkeys were skinny, and no one wanted to even think about a Russian bird. If we got into a pinch, we might settle for a Scandinavian hen, but the angling always started at the American Embassy—they always ordered a pile of Butterballs and had them delivered hard as rocks through the Diplomatic Pouch. None of us were embassy employees and our State Department status at the Peace Corps (1) wore out, and (2) didn’t have any clout to begin with. So we had to buddy up to someone in order to save the rest of us from a pasta Thanksgiving (which Lisa would have pulled off, but still…). The problem was that this embassy tribe of employees was usually pretty transient. As soon as one of us got to know any of them, their term was up and they were going home, but once in a while (usually with an invitation to our infamous gathering), some Secretary of Something would tack on a 25 lb. bird for us. Otherwise there was smuggling. If one of us had an autumn trip to the States lined up, or visiting family, we would bring back a turkey or two. The American’s didn’t care if we took it out of the country, but the Latvian’s always scratched their heads at us bringing it in. That frozen ball shrinked-wrapped in plastic with English all over it appeared mighty threatening notwithstanding the pop-up indicator.

So once the stress of the turkey was over, we could look forward to the rest. Scrounging ingredients to make American side dishes, fudging recipes to make things taste like Grandma’s, and the crazy routes and distances we would take to make it “home” for Thanksgiving was always part of the fun. See? Creative!

More often than not, Lisa would host Thanksgiving. For one she loves to cook and entertain, and for another, she has a house and the space for often 30 of us. One year, actually I think it was the year Lisa was in the States after having given birth to her second daughter on Halloween, we rented a villa (for lack of a better word). It was a big old house, with lots of land, rolling hills, a barn and a sauna. We had the complete run of the place. I think about 20 of us spent the weekend there, cooking and decorating, sledding, keeping the heat going in the house, reading by the fire, general monkeying around.

Thanksgivings were always very cold, beautiful, delicious and made us all the more thankful to be together in sometimes God-forsaken Latvia. And they had become infectious. By this time our Thanksgiving gatherings had created something of a buzz in the international community and everyone wanted to experience what we had that day. Often we had foreign guests, and they were always very cautious not to steal the show or trample on our heritage. They knew they were guests; observers to our Americana.

I think back on those days, remember how hard we worked to create something special for each other through all the senses. Those holidays inspire me to work every day at creatively creating comfort, safety, warmth and love. Thanksgiving is absolutely part of this story.

And I wish you all a happy, memory-making, creative, inspiring and bountiful Thanksgiving!

Curveballs

Clearly, emotions and tensions were running high that Christmas in Florida. My mother, aunt, grandfather and I, who were all there living in the thick of it, were reeling from our sudden loss and trying to deal with our own shock and grief while trying to soothe each other—and it wasn’t working very well. Winnie was a rudder. She was an irreplaceable touchstone for all of us, and coming to terms with what her absence would really mean was devastating.

Needless to say, it was a somber Christmastime, and I was grateful for my husband’s natural detachment from such emotional curveballs--he had the energy to carry on with the children and keep me somewhat attached to their reality. I’ll say this about him: he is an expert at dealing with the here and now. He always finds a way to stay grounded in crisis, and he’s a fixer. Sometimes to a fault, but at that point in time, I loved him for it.

With that said, what happened next seemed to come entirely out of left field, but in retrospect, this is exactly how my husband operates. In the short time between my grandmother’s death and Christmas, he told me he was offered a job. A good one. In Chicago. And they would pay to move us. And he took it.

Behind

Oh boy, am I behind! It's hard to write about the past when there's so much present going on! Anyway, on with the story...

We were in the new house for a little more than a month before we went to the US for a three-week Christmas trip in 1999. We were set to go to my mother's, who at the time lived in Florida, for the holidays and a 60th wedding anniversary party for my grandparents, which was the prelude and really the biggest reason for making the trip.

It all felt very rushed having just moved and then packing up again for a long trip, although, Florida in December was certainly something to look forward to since we’d already had two months of winter. It was all sorted out, though, and we’d arranged for friends to live in our house while we were away. It was still so new and there weren’t any other houses around it at the time, therefore it would have been very unwise to leave it empty.

So after almost 24 hours of travelling with a 4 ½ and 1 ½ year old, we’d arrived at my mother’s in sunny Orlando running around without big heavy coats and boots. My grandparents, Winnie and Bill, rushed over—they hadn’t yet met Caroline and were anxious to get their hands on both kids and me, too. My grandmother and daughter quickly found kindred spirits in each other. They traded coy smiles and then Caroline with wide eyes fondled everything sparkly about Winnie (there was always A LOT!). Winnie affectionately dubbed her, “Tilly” and little did she know that in a few short months “Tilly” would inherit the moniker of “Mini Winnie” for her verbal and willful yet beautifully poised traits so clearly personified by her great grandmother, a true original. We had a great visit, laughing until crying, and lots of tight squeezes that told me I was safe in the arms of those who love me and believe in me most.

I suppose like most people, I had very special relationships with my grandparents, particularly my grandmothers. From Winnie, I learned how to charm with a confident, quick wit; how to dig into the bigger picture of things; how to squeal loudly when very happy, and how to sob deeply when very sad; how to wear jewelry; how to sew; and how to be relentless with personal convictions. From my Grandma Carol, I learned how to entertain; how to make others feel accepted and special; how to shop; how to carry on a conversation even if I’m bored to tears; how to identify many trees, flowers and birds and marvel in their beauty; and how to honor tradition. Both of them, two very different women, taught me how to be very creative and resourceful, love with my whole heart, put all my faith in God, and arrange furniture. I know I am Winnie’s treasure and Carol’s jewel, I know they hope and dream for me, I know they see pieces of themselves in me, and I know that they are full of pride and protection for me. I adore them just as much.

Anyway, just two days after our little homecoming, Winnie fell asleep in the beauty parlor chair she sat in every Saturday morning. We had a funeral instead of an anniversary celebration. The trip was turning out to be something different…and that’s not the half of it.