MEMOIR MEMENTOS
An unexpected and delightful benefit of publishing my father Stanley Brush's
memoir "Farewell The Winterline, Memories of a Boyhood In India" last
year are the new friendships we're making with readers from around the world!
Some of these wonderful folks are storytellers, raconteurs, and authors
as well, though not all have published works. Bill & I have asked several
friends if they would be willing to share their stories with our readers.
Story excerpts will be featured here in The Winterline Journal and on the
upcoming Autobiography & Memoir section for FarewellTheWinterline.com
To begin this issue, we’re happy
to share more of Sylvia’s childhood reminisces, in prose this
time. Her flair for poetry and prose engage many who read her
work. Sylvia’s warmth, joie de vivre, and diverse interests keep
her life full and make her a most appealing friend!
MEMORIES OF HOME
(excerpt from a longer essay)
by Sylvia Staub
To reach my childhood home, my dreams and memories must breach
a distance of over 11,000 miles and a time span of several decades.
The house still stands, I am told, but who owns it now I do not
know and do not wish to know, for that would simply be too painful.
It was built by my grandparents early in the 20th century on the
outskirts of a country town some 90 miles from Calcutta. A brick
villa built in a late-Victorian style, its tiled roof flamed red
against a rich green canopy of mahogany trees. The trees had been
planted from seed by my father to mark the boundary between our
property and the paddies that stretched beyond, finally to fade
in a haze of heat into jungle. That was, of course, long before
my birth. The villa’s rooms were amply proportioned, their
ceilings high. My family took pride in the fact that all of the
wood used in its construction was teak imported from Burma, so planned
to foil the voracious appetite of white ants and the rot of Bengal's
climate, its fierce sun and torrential rains. With its façade
so studied an expression of the symmetry and orderliness of the
Victorian era, our family home in far off India might well have
been a transplant from the southeast of Britain: bay windows, decorative
gray verticals in a Greek-key design scaling the rosy brick of its
walls, white fascia boards, and a porch with wrought-iron railings
and fancy woodwork fronting wide front doors of highly polished
wood. Those stout doors and the impressive sunburst pattern set
atop them yet again, in my view, conveyed to all who approached
the solidarity of the family and the exuberant optimism of the Victorians,
which extended into and through the Edwardian period of my grandparents.
I am of mixed ancestry, a child of two very different worlds,
East and West. The males in my lineage were “army”,
having come to India from Britain with Victorian regiments. They,
and later their sons, married women of dual ancestry. I am of the
fourth generation of those two family lines that began in the latter
half of the 19th century and made their home in India. As my granddad
used to say, “Originally, everyone came here from somewhere
else; we are merely the last to have arrived.”
My grandmother ran our home from a rocker, the artifacts of her
daily use neatly deployed on a table at her side---a yellow Parker
fountain pen and a writing tablet in a tapestry cover; the 11" x
5" hisap (accounts) ledger; her knitting bag, with needles
protruding from a half-finished sweater; the book she was reading.
And I hear again the shuffle of my granddad's slippers, wandering
restless through the house, pausing now and then at the front door.
He is expecting a parcel of homeopathic remedies. My childhood was
punctuated by doses of Kalimer and Natrumphos, and any of a dozen
other natural salts and tinctures. Granddad's homeopathic paraphernalia
included a mysterious black box to which a couple of electric chords
were attached, ending in hand grips. On hot afternoons, when the
others were asleep, he would entice us youngsters into his small
workshop with pieces of rock candy. There, amid its clutter of tools,
old yellowing newspapers, pills in tiny bottles, and his beloved “scientific” tomes,
he would talk us into taking hold of those hand grips. As we stood,
each in turn, gripping the grips, Granddad would throw a switch
that sent a mild electrical charge through our bodies, making them
vibrate like chattering teeth. It was scary but exciting, and tacitly
secret.
At sundown each day, he would stand on our driveway with his hands
locked behind him and his legs slightly apart, as though “at
ease” on a parade ground. His boyhood was spent in the Andaman
Islands, in a British army camp where his father was a bandmaster.
Granddad had no bugle on which to play taps, but as he faced the
dying sun I would hear him softly singing: "Day is done/Gone
the sun/From the sea, from the hills, from the sky/All is well,
safely rest/God is nigh." I have to thank him for nurturing
my lively young imagination with bedtime stories to rival "Raiders
of the Lost Ark," and for my lifelong love of the stars. On
dark nights, when the constellations were at their brightest, he
would take me into our garden and teach me their names.
In Tucson, Arizona, where street lighting is minimal as an accommodation
to the Mt. Kit observatory, the stars hang low. Often, as I look
up at them, I think back to starry nights in our garden in India
and the old man who taught me to love them. Here, in the shadow
of the Catalinas, I am recreating my Indian childhood. I have planted
the plants that grew in my grandmother's garden: bougainvillea in
several voluptuous shades; bright-leaved crotons; ferns and oleanders
and bushes of jasmine; and watery plants with huge serrated leaves
like the torn ears of elephants. In summer our back porch is the
locus of pots of marigolds and hanging baskets of pinks and portulaca.
There is much in this Sonoran Desert town to remind me of my roots:
brilliant sunsets and the inky silhouettes of palms; one-story houses
whose soft-colored adobe exteriors are not unlike the stucco facades
of my homeland; people whose color varies from bronze to beige to
white; the dancing heat of summer and the same winter chill; and,
from July to September, lightning and thunder of Wagnerian dimension,
followed by monsoonal rains. After the rain, the sodden earth releases
the same aromatic fragrance. Here, where time moves as gently as
in my childhood, remembering is easy.
Readers may email Sylvia at: swstaub@yahoo.com
© Copyright 2003, Sylvia Staub
NANAK - Gardener of Childhood Memories
by Cynthia Brush
Nanak was a humble man, reliable as the cycle of the seasons.
Browned like the earth with deep gentle eyes, tall, lean, and soft-spoken,
he would come to the screened front door when he needed to discuss
some matter with my parents. In the warm season, he often worked
barefoot all day long, only occasionally wearing simple chuppals
(sandals).
But it is the garden at our home in Lahore (in what was then West
Pakistan during the late ‘50s and early ‘60’s)
that I remember best. We had two flower beds across the dusty gravel
driveway in front of our verandah. Always planted with annuals,
pansies – my favorites – marked the end of the scorching
summers. As new buds unfurled, I crouched on elbows and knees with
my sister to study their frilly faces pondering the choicest colors.
We got tremendous pleasure out of these aesthetic discussions
prompted by Nanak’s handiwork. She and I visited every rose
planted along the length of the drive assessing the virtues of their
heady blooms. I recall, we finally settled on a luscious dark black-red
and a vibrant sunset hued blend as our particular favorites. Never
a thought of aphids, rust or blackspot to spoil our pleasures.
Another summer delight were the waist-high dahlias. Masses of
them filling the hedged circle of the round-about at the end of
the drive. Crowning the center was a peach tree, I believe. I used
to wade through the dahlias (though I shudder to confess it), carefully
picking my steps as not to topple any of the flowers. Arms held
aloft, I used to peer at their layered, multi-petalled faces delighting
in their loveliness.
The back of the grounds, behind the round-about, was the least
explored area of our garden. But there was a small vegetable patch
nestled near a majestic evergreen. Near, or in, the vegetables was
a small cemetary of deceased pets and assorted road casulties I
insisted on bringing home for a proper burial.
Another well-appreciated feature were the sturdy lawns. Seemed
like acres of them to my young eyes. Enclosed by dense, tall hedges,
they spread broadly on both sides of the driveway. My sister and
I played for hours on those grassy expanses. I can’t imagine
the time it must have taken Nanak to keep them so beautifully.
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Watering was done by flooding irrigation, a common practice in
third-world countries. Everything was edged with small raised berms
to hold the water, allowing it to soak through to the roots. The
excess would be channeled off through a system of small canals that
intersected the entire college campus where we lived. After saturating
the soil and letting it dry to a certain point, it would be time
to roll the surfaces smooth. I remember once watching him guiding
a patient white bullock hitched to a heavy water-filled iron roller,
walk up and down the lawns, a strip at a time, until they were perfectly
groomed. One year our family went on a two-week driving vacation
to Kashmir, we returned to find the grass up to our armpits. My
sister and I galloped gaily through it snorting and shaking our
heads, pretending to be wild horses, before Nanak groomed the lawns
again.
The trees were magnificent! A row of tall eucalyptus stood like
sentries in front of the long hedge. I used to watch their leaves
and branches sway in the wind, awed by their stately grandeur. One
spring, I gathered armfuls of eucalyptus bark, which was shed in
great ragged peels. I kept a diary for an entire year written on
the smooth inner side of eucalyptus bark scraps.
There were two broad banyan trees, planted like hefty doormen
on either side of the drive, announcing the front of the house.
They were our palaces, forts, forested tree tops or sailing ships,
depending on the day. We had tea parties and other adventures embraced
in their limbs.
Gardeners, in the social structure of that time and place, were
the most modestly paid of the permanent household help. Ranking
third, behind the cook and the bearer. Yet it is Nanak’s loving
care of those beautiful surroundings that I try to emulate in my
own garden so many decades later.
Readers may email Cynthia at: cynthia@FarewellTheWinterline.com
©Copyright 1998, Cynthia Brush
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