Posted by Margi on Mar 16, 2013

Of Gardening Stores, Gardening Catalogs, and Hope

Hellebores are among the first perennials to bloom around our yard, sometimes showing their downward facing flowers as early as January in our mild maritime climate. That’s also the time that the gardening catalogs start coming in the mail, so those two harbingers of warmer, sunnier days ahead are welcome lead-ins to the promise of post-winter life. The early blooming hellebores and the garden catalogs also remind me, in a gentle and warm way, of my parents. One of the greatest and most unexpected joys of my life occurred when my parents, then in their seventies, made a transcontinental move to be a regular part of the lives of the very young grandchildren that had finally appeared in their lives after decades of hopeful waiting. Despite their age and the necessity of their leaving behind a dense network of dear family and friends, they voluntarily, in a spirit of adventurous joy, moved from Buffalo, New York to Washington State to spend the last decade of their lives with their daughter and son and their families. As they saw it, they could finally revel in being Grandma and Grandpa to those four young children, two of them twins, all born within three years of each other. The house my parents lived in was on our block, just a brief walk down our street and up the hill, and there in the spacious back yard my father had a raised bed garden put in so that, for the first time in his life, he would have a place (and now that he was finally retired, the time) to try his hand at being a backyard gardener. While my mother’s domain was that of annual flowers, particularly those she planted in the flower boxes which she endlessly fussed over, my father dreamed of the tomatoes, raspberries, carrots, and radishes we would harvest.   And harvest we did, though certainly not by the bushel-basket full.  In any case, I loved helping him with the gardening work, and since he and I were exactly on the same page when it came to dreaming of “next year’s perfect garden” when those early spring catalogs started coming in, we ordered more gardening tools than our little raised bed garden could possibly need. (My mother had many a wry comment to make when the brown UPS truck pulled up yet again with another box she had not ordered.) Those memories – now decades old – still warm...

Posted by Margi on Apr 7, 2013

Healing the Nisqually: 160 Years after the Medicine Creek Treaty

What caught my attention the first time I visited the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge was the overlap between the estuary restoration project intended to heal the environment by removing seven miles of dikes, and the healing that is also going on among the original inhabitants of this land in the aftermath of the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek. This is an astonishing location, the locus of a complex mosaic of human, environmental, and political histories.

Posted by Margi on Jul 9, 2013

Upon Losing a Beloved Family Dog

Why does it hurt so much to lose a dog like Loki? Why did I sob and weep more bitterly at his death than I did when key humans in my life have died?

Many dog lovers have pondered that question, focusing their thoughts on the absolutely non-conditional acceptance that a dog – unlike most people – gives those whom he loves. Moreover, the intensely lived and telescoped nature of a canine lifespan seems to concentrate the highs and the lows of dog/human interdependence and bonding.

Posted by Margi on Dec 6, 2012

The Kinship of Family and Ethnic Heritage

How are you, or they, (or we) related? Such a basic, simple question, especially using the second or third person pronouns, has begun many an anthropologist’s first tentative days “in the field”. Asking this question is a sure way to start learning the community, filling in the cast of characters, associating specific people with particular households, working up to a census-like investigation that can provide a basic demographic understanding that can in turn serve as the basis for asking these people more complicated questions about their lives later on. But what about that first-person pronoun? The question “How are we related?” might be most likely asked, in a US context, at a wedding or funeral. Unlike the Tibetan people in India whose lives I studied several decades ago (and who, a decade or two before that, back in their homeland of Tibet, could have answered that question going back seven generations), most Americans have a shallow sense of their kinship ties. Our most important relationships tend to be voluntary rather than kin-based, and given the mobile nature of our lives, most of us do not really expect our BFFs to be “best friends forever”.  And as for kinfolk? Who among us can confidently define what a “second cousin once removed” even is? Things were not always this way, of course, even in settler societies like the US or Australia or Canada, where people came to live in other people’s lands voluntarily as hopeful immigrants, half-voluntarily, as indentured workers, or very much involuntarily as imported-for-labor convicts or chained-up slaves. Among all of those earliest ocean-crossers, however, memories of “back there” were still fresh, to be transmitted  to descendants via such cultural creations as stories, culinary recipes, songs, heritage languages. But this process of remembering and talking about “the days back then” did not start and end with the conquistadors, the Viking explorers, the first African slaves, the various waves of European peasants and burghers, the Asian builders of the transcontinental railroads, or any other groups who came to North American shores, voluntarily or involuntarily, long ago. Even the continent’s indigenous populations have changed over the centuries and millennia, adopting new technologies from their neighbors, intermarrying, and in some cases, even engaging in considerable permanent population movements across the face of the land. Today’s interconnected processes of globalization have only increased the flow of human beings across geopolitical borders. Contemporary stories of “back there,” while certainly transmitted orally from parent to child...

Posted by Margi on Dec 4, 2012

My Brother the Anthropologist

Perhaps that arrangement (growing up in an ethnic neighborhood; going to school in a very different one) is what gave both of us the facility we needed to belong, yet not belong, to two very different social worlds. We could fit in either setting, do the fly-on-the-wall thing – observing ourselves as both as part of an inclusive “us”, and then as an “us” as distinct from “them”- change settings, and then reverse the process with our other social world…. with no formal anthropological truing at all, our parents had penetrated right to the heart of anthropology, guiding us, mostly wordlessly, to see the strange as familiar and the familiar as strange.

Posted by Margi on Dec 6, 2012

The Kinship of Homelands and Places

Two stories – one about my unknowingly photographing the supposed site of the Kraków chakra in the Wawel Castle courtyard, the other, about my brushing up against “a place of power” at Cape Flattery, Neah Bay, Washington – allow me to reflect on the dynamic tension between seeking for rootedness in a homeland or deeply meaningful special place, and, in this dismodern age of protean “neoidentities”, relishing freedom of movement and affiliation.

Posted by Margi on Dec 6, 2012

Kraków

Ancient Polish capital, touchstone of each of my travels to Poland, a city I have lived in for one summer, walked through endlessly, and explored with both of my sons … I love this place! As a child raised by Polish-American parents who spoke Polish as their first language, I heard from them the story of “the trumpeter of Kraków”, the bugler who, from the high tower of the Mariacki Basilica, sounded the alarm during an invasion by the Tatars in 1241. Spotted and targeted by their best archer, the story goes, the trumpeter was shot in the throat by an arrow as he was playing the characteristic bugle call as a warning to his fellow citizens. His bravery and death are commemorated to this day by a live playing of the Hejnal Mariacki from this very tower every hour on the hour, each time broken off...

Posted by Margi on Dec 6, 2012

Pacific Northwest

The Pacific Northwest has become my home, with its spectacular scenery, often misty skies, pearly light, closeness to salt water, green, green conifers, and, in the distance, snow-covered mountains. My children were both born here. My parents uprooted themselves from a dense social network of family and friends and moved across the continent to live the last decade of their lives here with us, and they died and are buried here. This land is my...

Posted by Margi on Dec 6, 2012

The Kinship of Suffering, Evil, and Injustice

Wellsprings of pain, particularly those that are broadly collective, spanning continents and generations (like the forces of genocide, slavery, or other forms of oppression) involve linkages that touch more than the individual who is struggling to fight free.

Posted by Margi on Dec 6, 2012

Swastika

Swastika displayed at the Apteka Pod Orłem – Muzeum Pamięci Narodowej. This “Pharmacy under the sign of the Eagle” (today a “Museum of National Remembrance”) was located in the Podgórze ghetto of Kraków. It was operated by Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a Polish Catholic pharmacist recognized by Yad Vashem as a “Righteous among Nations” for his work rescuing Jews inPoland during the Holocaust. Picture taken by my then-17 year old son, Anders....

Posted by Margi on Dec 7, 2012

Gooseberries

Here are some of the plants around our home that serve dual purposes: aesthetic appeal (color, form, texture, etc.) and taste (fruit and vegetables). I love plants that are purely beautiful (roses, lilacs, clematis) or fragrant (daphne, sarcococca), but the idea of combining aesthetic appeal plus edibility in landscape really appeals to me.