| Bolton, Massachusetts |
Bolton is where my family lived when I was born, and my little sister after me, too. We lived on a farm that belonged to an old New England farmer named Charlie. Charlie had a Canada goose named Sam, and he used to feed me spaghetti with ketchup, and cream cheese straight from the package with a spoon. Bolton was pretty rural then. I was back through there on a whim a couple of years ago, when I went to my friend Jeremy's wedding nearby, and found the old farm. Across the street, what had been the neighbors' farm had become a subdivision with suburban houses and all that kind of thing. There was a corporate office park at the end of the road, where there had previously been nothing.
My parents had told me that Bud, Charlie's son, still lived in the same old farmhouse that had been my first home. So once we found the place, we daringly decided to try just dropping in and saying hi. Bud wasn't there, but his grandson Bobby and his wife and toddler were, and they invited us in. The house seemed so much smaller than I remembered, and closer to the road... but there were things about it that hadn't changed since I'd been there. Bobby directed us to a large outdoor barbecue that was going on, where Bud could be found.
I'm glad we went. I heard that Bud passed away not too long after, and I was glad to have seen him again. I wonder if I go back in another twenty years, and tell people I was one of the hippies that lived on Sugar Road, everyone'll still know exactly who I mean.
| Washington, New Hampshire |
Washington, New Hampshire is where we went when Charlie died. We built a house there the summer and fall that I was four, and then when it got to be actual winter, we picked up and moved to Peru.
My great-grandmother, Vicky, had given my mother five acres of land. Vicky had owned a huge amount of land, and she parceled it up into small plots which she gave to everyone in her family, but most of it was given to the state park system to become the Clark Shove Robinson Memorial Forest, after her late husband.
Washington is the perfect place to go if you either want to escape everything, or choose exactly what (and who) you're taking with you. Our house there is about two miles out from the center of town, where there's a general store and post office, to complement the very classic New England town common which houses the church, school, and town hall.
On the other hand, Washington is a tough place to be a weirdo kid. I don't think I ever stood a chance of coming close to fitting in there, and after I skipped the second grade, I was definitely out of luck on that count. There were about 50 kids in the school there, in grades 1-8, when I attended. Starting school there after having lived in Peru was really hard. I'm not sure if I ever went to a full year of school there, though -- we would typically keep going back to Peru sometime during the winter.
But, summer in Washington is beautiful. The house we built (and when I say we built it, what I mean is my father drew up the plans, we got lumber and supplies and whatnot, and every single nail was pounded by our family or our friends) is easy walking distance from an absolutely perfect little lake, the weather is gorgeous, and there's literally nothing to interrupt complete laziness. Unfortunately, I just can't imagine living there for the long-term basis anymore, because it's too, too deserted for my liking, and I'm not really willing to have to drive forty miles to go to a movie or out for dinner or to a bookstore... and besides, winters are nasty. Just nasty.
| Chinchero, Peru |
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| Abby in 1980 |
We first arrived in Peru sometime around New Year's Day in 1977. My entire life, I had listened to my parents talking about Peru, where they'd lived before but I had never been. I had wanted to go to Peru for as long as I could remember. Being there was a lifelong dream come true -- not a long life at that point, sure, but hey, it was definitely something pretty major for me.
Our plane landed in Cusco, and I remember walking down the stairs off the plane, and then feeling horrible. I walked about twenty steps over to a pillar near the airport door, and puked my guts out. That was over twenty-three years ago and I can still remember it like it was yesterday. However, after that moment, I don't remember much for a while. I was suffering from severe altitude sickness, and the first week is really a blur.
On my fifth birthday, we went to Chinchero, which is a noted weaving town, because of my father's interest in Andean textiles, and his desire to find traditional weavers from whom to learn. I remember vividly my birthday lunch, which was tuna sandwiches on round Peruvian bread (not entirely unlike tiny pitas), with watermelon for dessert. We ate sitting on Pumacaca, one of several interestingly-carved boulders in the Chinchero ruins.
We decided to live in Chinchero, and found a place to rent -- the upstairs of a large Spanish colonial building on the main plaza, where the Sunday markets are. The building had a downstairs too, and a cancha or courtyard, with a faucet (running water!) that was a public water source on market days.
I made many friends, and discovered that even though I spoke neither Spanish nor Quechua initially, there's another language that really is universal to children, and that language is play. A game of tag is a game of tag is a game of tag -- and in fact, it's from that fairly universal context that I first started learning Quechua and Spanish.
One of my most vivid memories from that first year is of one night, when I woke up as a group of men walked by in the street outside our home, speaking loudly to each other in Quechua. First, I realized it was Quechua they were speaking -- and then it dawned on me that I had understood every word, perfectly, as well as I understood English. From then on, I spoke both Spanish and Quechua fluently.
Quechua is the household language of the indigenous people, and the first language learned by children in Chinchero. My little sister, who turned two during that first year in Chinchero, spoke Quechua as her first language, and when we first returned to the United States, she still spoke nothing but Quechua.
When I think about my childhood, I think mostly about Chinchero.
| Lircay, Peru |
| Quito, Ecuador |
| Riobamba, Ecuador |
| Ithaca, New York |
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| 10th grade class picture |
I did spend the next two years doing a pretty decent job of working out what a geekgirl was, though. This was my obligatory middle school introduction to playing Dungeons & Dragons, for example, and lunch periods spent in the computer room in the library writing really moronic things in BASIC, or else playing Bolo or Choplifter. I was the only girl in the computer club and the D&D club. You can learn a lot from being the only girl surrounded by adolescent boys. Many of those lessons still stand me in good stead in my career today.
In 1985, instead of heading for high school, I went with my family back to Peru, for my mother to do fieldwork for her thesis. It was during this time that we lived in Ollantaytambo and Cusco. When we returned, I had some high school to go to, and instead of attending the main Ithaca High School, I chose to attend the Alternative Community School. I guess two years of mainstream U.S. education had been about all I could take.
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| My high school years |
In 1988, high school and I came to a parting of the ways, at about the same time as I got a brochure in the mail which read, "Why wait to go to college?" Though I was accepted to Simon's Rock, I decided to take a year off and work in between high school and college, and it was during that year that we went to Japan.
I last lived in Ithaca for summer of 1990, before moving to Chicago on a day's notice. And as of this year, neither my parents nor my sister live there anymore. But for some reason, perhaps nothing more than inertia, my family was based in Ithaca longer than anywhere else.
| Ollantaytambo, Peru |
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| Molly and a cacao tree in Quillabamba in 1986 |
| Cusco, Peru |
| Tsukuba Science City, Japan |
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| Abby in Japan in 1989 |
Japan was an entirely new experience for me, no matter how much the seasoned traveller I considered myself to be. It was like the opposite experience, in many ways, to living in Latin America, where the dollar was strong and the setting lacked technology and little niceties. Where a buck in Latin America might buy you a lavish dinner out, a buck in Japan didn't buy you a candy bar -- and where rural Peruvian life had been very free-form in many ways, things in Japan were very rigid and carefully delineated.
Japan was far more alien to me than Latin America ever had been. No doubt this was in part because I'd grown up in Latin America, and my life had pretty much always involved trying to balance that culture, and everything it meant to me, with life in the United States. But fundamental, underlying assumptions of Japanese daily life were also at tremendous odds with my own personal feelings and beliefs, especially as a young woman.
Where I had always felt great embarrassment about the condescension often displayed by my fellow Americans towards the less-well-off third world cultures of South America, I learned something new about the notion of cultural superiority while I lived in Japan: how it felt to be the uncivilized barbarian. No matter what I did, no matter how good I was at going to new cultures and finding a place for myself, I would always be a gaijin, and a gaijin would always be inferior.
Though I only held out in Japan for a few months before fleeing back to the United States and on to college, I was definitely changed by my time there. I was fortunate enough, before going to Japan, to have been instructed by my Japanese karate sensei in the U.S. to study tea ceremony and flower arranging. The director of my mother's institute found me a sensei of both while I was there, and despite my initial skepticism, they were wonderful things to study. Takano Hiroko, my sensei of ikebana and o-cha, was an amazing woman whose tutelage I'm lucky to have had.
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| The day I left Japan |
| Great Barrington, Massachusetts |
| Chicago, Illinois |
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| Silicon Valley, California |