Garden of Abundance

How is it possible that in one week at the lake my zucchini plant can produce fruit the size of torpedoes and grow to be over three feet high? It's starting to look like "Audrey III." I am half afraid to approach it for fear it will bite me. But it's not just Audrey. The whole front garden exploded in  into a blousy mass of green and pink and yellow. The phlox back border burst into a pink lineup, the weight of the tomato plants overcame their cages and flopped forward. My new "gourmet daisy" (I have forgotten its real name) acquired at the Master Gardener Sale is proudly holding up the right back corner just as I had hoped. And my birthday gift blue arctic willow seems happier each day in her new home.

I have a sense that my whole life is like this little garden in the front of my house. It is abundant with blessings and possibility. But letting go of my work here is proving harder than I thought it would be. After five years of full-tilt boogie I am about to hand it off to someone new to Vermont and new to organizational management. I have left a cooky crumb trail (not unlike the HouseBook for my guests), full of as much information as can be captured in words. I am facing how attached I have become to my policy pals, to my colleague and to other social workers, and to my peers around the country. I am letting go of paid work, of a keen sense of the role I have played in this small state. In one way, of who I am right now. The uncertainty ahead pales by comparison to the struggle to let go.

In fact, as always, the new and uncertain is a thrill ride for me. Any anxiety about that is captured in the multiple lists I am making. And as everyone knows, if you can make a list you are surely in control of the situation! The digital age means I now have lists on my phone, on my computer, on the good old yellow pads. I can combine them by cutting and pasting, cross items off by deleting a task (not as satisfying as drawing a line through it). Somehow I keep remembering items that I fear are not on a list. Find out how I can get all my prescriptions for the time away ahead of time, for example. Then there are the things I just might not complete before I leave the country even though I am hellbent to do them. The knitted baby gift for a much-anticipated granddaughter of good friends, the ministries directory for church. Getting on the plane for Armenia may be a welcome relief.

WomanPower Armenian-style

In anticipation of the Armenian Adventure, I had the privilege of meeting and talking with several members of the Board of AIWA, the Armenian International Women's Association, in Watertown, MA yesterday. I am early in the networking process, but I am going to predict now that this meeting was instrumental in my education about the status of women in Armenia and current programs to support their empowerment. These American women of Armenian descent are highly educated contributors to health care, education, development, women's rights, and science, in this country and in Armenia.

We talked about everything from the personal connections that explained how I got to the meeting, to reproductive health policies to the rise in c-section rates to maternal mortality worldwide. We established enough connections among us (Wellesley, the State Department, public health, the judiciary, daughters) to know we could do business.

There is nothing to match a group of strong, smart, energized women with a shared goal. The AIWA Board welcomed me with overwhelming generosity, making me feel I was among friends who both would help me make the most of my time in their beloved Armenia--and who would gladly accept whatever I could offer in the way of skills and experience.

One of their programs, carried out in conjunction with the American University of Armenia, is the Women's Entrepreneurship Program (WEP), which has already graduated over 200 women who want to start businesses or be better managers. AIWA (www.AIWAInternational.org) also supports a health center offering sexual and reproductive health services, a shelter for battered women and children, a women's center, and scholarships for women.

I came back to the quiet of the lake at sunset with the distinct feeling that I was standing at one of those turning points in life we look back on and say, "Ah! That was the moment I embarked on a new path."

Traveling Together

For me, today is the start of a week at Lake Ninevah near Mt. Holly, a place long held close to my heart. Not for the first time, I will have days with my sister enjoying the water, the back roads, the perfect summer white, and morning "dips."

Tomorrow is the start of a week in my little house by sister and brother, Loretta and Richard from San Antonio and Philadelphia, respectively. I think I found all the weird things in the house and have fixed or explained them to death for my visitors. I like to think of Loretta and Richard as guests--they are coming into an amazingly clean house with wine and flowers to greet them along with a veritable treasure trove of Visitor Center information. And I am half sorry I won't meet them.

My late brother Bill and I took a vacation to the Southern Oregon Coast with Elderhostel back in about 2006. It was after his stem cell transplant and he was feeling good. Among the firs and dunes we visited as grown-ups, we found freedom from the assigned or assumed family roles of big sister/second mother and pesky little brother. I had a chance to see how at ease Bill was with strangers, how he engaged them in conversation and made everyone laugh. It was almost but not quite like meeting someone new. I could see why he had been successful as a salesman and businessman, how he pulled stories out of people they didn't know they were telling.
Unlike me, Bill had a prodigious memory for the finest and funniest details of our lives as well as the names of all the firs (there are seven in Oregon and after naming the Douglas I am done). He named the hawks and wildflowers we were seeing, and spotted the eagle on our boat trip up the Rogue River.

Bill took that trip with me to help me over a rough spot in my life and I treasure the memories of it, perhaps even more so now that he is gone. I hope Loretta and Richard find joy and new connections in these beautiful Vermont hills and valleys, just as Bill and I did in the forests and dunes on the Oregon coast.

It's beautiful in Vermont right now--just the way summer should be. I am hustling around with multiple lists in my head, getting my cute little Montpelier house ready for her first rental guests next week. I hope I have applied the eyes of a newcomer to this place. Finding the weirdnesses in your own house is not easy. One time when I lived in West Virginia, a guest took a bath because she could not figure out how to make the shower work but was too embarrassed to ask me. It was one of those weirdnesses.Here, it's probably the puzzle involved in getting the TV and DVD player working. It's a mystery even to me. What I am worried about is what is not a mystery to me but might be to new eyes.

Breaking down the steps to using the washer seems ridiculous until you look at the washer. I keep reminding myself this is both too much information and essential "in the event..." It can, of course, be ignored if not needed.

This is a good project for me--it has forced me finally to swap the sewing center with an out-of-place bookshelf and to replace a behemoth of a second TV with a new smaller flat screen--which I can place on aforesaid bookshelf and open up the room more. And it keeps me busy while I wait for my DiploDaughter to come home from her war zone post. It's 24 days today, by the way.

Read In to Armenia

Mt. Ararat and the Khor Virap Monastery 

The next adventure is Armenia! Finding guidebooks, maps, modern-day literature, movies, and even current event news from here in the States has not been the easy. But friends and colleagues who have experienced the pleasures of Armenia have been generous in their descriptions, recommendations, and connections. So far I have discovered more than enough to do, see, learn in the ten weeks I will be there with my sister Denise while she works on a Rule of Law project for USAID/ABA.

My predictions are: monastery visits, Mt. Ararat, cooking lessons, food market shopping joys, long walks and old churches, finding unusual to unique items to bring home (rugs anyone?), volunteering at the Women's Resource Center in Yerevan, and learning more about this very old, rich culture.