We went for a short walk in the freezing cold today. We passed by the former home of the co-founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross. It’s a beautiful house, with loads of daffodils and tulips in bloom.
Home of Gustave Moynier, co-founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Just a little farther up the road is the recently restored Chateau de Voltaire. I haven’t been in it since it was restored, so I am looking forward to seeing it AFTER THE PANDEMIC.
Voltaire’s house, Ferney-Voltaire, France.
Tomorrow’s walk may even take us into the cemetery!
I just heard this on the BBC and had to share it with you.
“This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.”
― John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
I’m happy to report that God’s little beady-eyed creature that made itself at home on Alice’s bed the other night went to meet his Maker yesterday. He had the grace to die out in the open, praise be, and not in some inaccessible place. RIP, Ratty.
Today is Ivy’s 6th birthday! She is loving lockdown, because she gets to go for walks with Alice, with me, with Poppy, with Jane’s dog Mila, and she is sleeping like a rock at night.
Thank goodness someone in this household is sleeping. Alice is wired on steroids and ringing up everyone she knows all around the world in the middle of the night, whereas I myself am reading the newspapers, subscribing to every video service on the planet, and generally staying up all night. We also went onto European Summer Time last night, so springing forward was even worse than usual.
We are facing many more weeks of lockdown, so suddenly creative pursuits are bursting forth here at rue de la Gendarmerie (Police Station Street, which is rather amusing). Alice has broken out her super-duper-fancy-schmancy new Bernina sewing machine, and I don’t know what she and Jane are plotting at the table, but it sounds mighty complicated from my perch on the chaise.
I have been doing so many boring things, like ironing pillowcases. Even watched a YouTube video on how to fold a fitted sheet, which did not change my life by one iota.
I’ve also been cooking up a storm, not to mention eating the results. Today I wanted to clean some stuff out of the freezer, so I used up a big bag of frozen broccoli to make this broccoli walnut blue cheese pesto. We will have it over pasta this week, or possibly on a pizza crust, as I have dough in the fridge that needs to be used up.
We ran out of bread today and I didn’t want to spend the time required to make a yeast bread. I remembered various kinds of Southern quick breads, so I whipped up a loaf of buttermilk bread. Used this recipe, but with only 1 tablespoon of sugar. Hot out of the oven, with some wonderful French salted butter, it was mighty fine indeed.
I awoke early this morning (question for later discussion: will I ever sleep again? is anybody sleeping?) to find all the lights blazing in the living room and Alice looking a bit bleary and reclined upon the sofa.
What on earth is going on? I asked.
She then recounted her evening in a quavery yet still poetic little voice:
That feeling of clean sheets, a shower at the end of a sweaty day, the authenticity of a physical moment. The bed, the shower, the book. Calm.
Shredded in one instant by the beady little eyes of one of God’s creatures that had just joined me in bed.
I am not prone to fuss. Or shouting. Or screaming. Even after cancer, a rat in bed does not warrant any unseemly stamping or carrying on.
I said, “bugger off”! and decamped to the living room, away from those quick clawed feet on the floor, the paper rustling, the undeniable fact that I was not alone.
I see that a lot of people are making bread these days, as am I (even though our boulangeries in France are open, but of course, bread being an utterly essential item here, and lack of same leading to riots and revolution).
The best recipe, the easiest (takes time, but that is unattended time), the one that never fails is here.
There’s even a video of how to make it, courtesy of the New York Times.
Go forth and conquer!
Image from Leite’s Culinaria. https://leitesculinaria.com/.
Yesterday I told my version of my maternal grandmother’s experience during the 1918 flu pandemic.
She had little formal education, but she was curious about everything and devoured the news every day. She was also a magnificent storyteller. I loved her so much and I used to spend a lot of time with her.
She took in ironing for pin money. She set up the ironing board in the kitchen, and while she stood there, smoothing and steaming her way through a huge pile of shirts, sheets, tablecloths, and handkerchiefs, I sat at the little oilcloth-covered table, drinking instant coffee, and writing down what she told me.
One day she talked a lot about her early life before and just after her mother died. When she finished talking, I realized she had spoken a poem.
Here is Della, in her own words.
Kneeled-down Places
I
My daddy always
bought us new shoes in the fall
when he’d sold the cotton.
We had a big field,
a hundred and some acres,
cotton and wheat and corn
and I don’t know what all.
The garden:
sweet potatoes and
Irish potatoes and
all summer vegetables.
And plenty of pumpkins.
We’d pick huckleberries,
the big gooseberries
we used to call them.
II
Huckleberries grow in the woods
and on the mountain.
All the children used to take buckets
and go up on the knob.
The boys took the axe along,
cut the stumps
and pine.
My mother,
I would say,
had sixty half-a-gallon jars
of huckleberries
when she died.
III
Mama made pies
most every morning
for us to take to school,
either blackberry
or pumpkin
or sweet potato.
She’d put them in a great old basket with a handle,
I have worked at the World Health Organization for 12 years, a fair amount of that time spent helping out in outbreaks, starting with the H1N1 flu pandemic. I also worked with the team dealing with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)–which is also a coronavirus–going on mission several times to Saudi Arabia and to South Korea, and the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014, when I accompanied senior officials to see the aftermath in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
I see how hard my colleagues in the emergencies programme work, day and night, with very limited staff, in everything from cholera to Ebola and influenza to whatever pops up. My admiration for them knows no bounds, which is why uninformed criticism of the WHO gets my dander up.
In December, when I was in North Carolina, staying with my family as my 21-year-old niece recovered from a heart transplant, I heard our WHO reports of an unknown virus, originating in China. I thought, this could get interesting–and alarming.
Having sat through endless meetings and briefings and pored over dozens and dozens of technical documents, I have been taking this outbreak seriously from the very beginning.
But I have been completely astonished, and dismayed, by the negative responses among the public to public health advice–the resistance, the nonchalance, the utter refusal to listen to facts, reason, and scientific evidence.
I realize we are living in a post-truth world, where everyone’s opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s, and that somehow I should not be surprised by all of his.
But I had another reason for being saddened and shocked. For me, this pandemic is personal.
It began on Christmas Eve 1918.
My maternal grandmother, then 10 years old, had come down with the flu earlier in the week. Her recently widowed mother had put her into her own bed. The little girl was so ill that her mother remarked, “My little Josephine won’t get up in the morning.”
She did not get up the next morning, nor for several more.
In the meantime, her mother also caught the flu.
After a few days, Josephine was better. She woke up, alone in her mother’s bed.
She raised herself up on one elbow and leaned way over to look down the hall into the parlor. There she saw her mother, lying too still. Ladies from the church were getting her dressed.
Josephine, whom everyone else called by her first name, Della, got out of her mother’s bed and went in search of her grandfather, to find out what was going on.
She found him in a rocking chair in front of the fireplace. He was bent over, holding his head in his hands. The hearth was wet with his tears.
The young woman in the parlor, Della’s mother, was his daughter, and she was being laid out for her burial.
She was the second of his children and the third person in his family to die that week. On Christmas Day, he would make his third trip to the cemetery in as many days.
They were killed by the 1918 flu, which ravaged the world and caused the deaths of somewhere between 20 and 40 million people–more than all those who died in the incredible carnage of the First World War.
The flu orphaned my grandmother and her 7 brothers and sisters.
“We didn’t have no Christmas that year,” she always said to me, as she related this tale to me over and over, throughout the many years of her long life.
Much worse was to come. The children were dispersed separately into foster care. My grandmother was sent to stay with some hateful people, who, I am sorry to say, were relatives of her parents.
They treated her horribly, like a servant, or worse. She was made to milk cows at 4 o’clock in the morning and then forced to drink spoiled milk, as fresh milk was reserved for the “real” family.
She told me how hard it was to pull the cows’ teats. It was freezing cold, and her little fingers were raw and red and she cried while she did it.
She also picked cotton, like everybody else, stuffing the cotton bolls into a huge sack she wore around her neck and dragged behind her.
Callie Campbell, 11 years old, picks 75 to 125 pounds of cotton a day, and totes 50 pounds of it when sack gets full. “No, I don’t like it very much.” Lewis W. Hine. Location: Potawotamie County, Oklahoma. PART OF: Photographs from the records of the National Child Labor Committee (U.S.) REPOSITORY: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
The African-American girls, she said, could always pick more. She wanted to be able to “pick a bale a day,” just like they did.
A bale is 350 pounds.
One day, once only, as far as I know, she managed to pick a bale of cotton. She was triumphant.
I asked her, what did you do then?
She said to me, “I was so tired, I just laid down at the end of the row. I couldn’t get up.”
As hard as all of that was, it was nothing compared to when the matriarch of the house locked her in her room and took the key, while she set the house afire and left.
Twice.
My grandmother jumped out the bedroom window.
Twice.
And lived to tell the tale.
Old Lady S, her relative and foster mother, was obviously mentally ill.
Many years later, my grandmother took her fiance, my grandfather, to meet her.
My grandfather was the kindest and most gentle person I have ever known. At his funeral, my father, who had known him for more than 50 years, said of him, “I never heard him say an unkind word.”
So when Pop met Old Lady S, who was ancient and blind by then, he took her hand and merely said, “I’ve heard so much about you.”
Della endured the horrors of her foster home for about 4 years. When she turned 14, she managed to meet up with her older sister, Bert, aged 16. They agreed to try to escape their situations.
They ran away and lied about their ages and were accepted into nursing school, at the State Hospital Training School in Morganton, North Carolina, sometimes known as the Western North Carolina Insane Asylum. After they graduated, they got jobs there.
On her first day of employment as a qualified nurse, my grandmother went to check on one of her patients. She found him hanging from a bedsheet he had tied to the back of the door.
Her life was always hard, but it got better from then on, especially when she stayed in a boarding house, in Charlotte, North Carolina, run by her aunt. I will tell this happier tale later.
But for now, I have written this to start a little campaign in honor of my grandmother.
Knowing what we know now, do you think Della would have said, oh, this outbreak is some kind of political nonsense, and there is no need to do anything we are advised to do, so let us go about our daily lives and ignore the authorities, because, after all, it’s our right to do so?
The pandemic changed my grandmother’s life forever. She was indelibly marked by that historic event. She warned me; she had lessons to impart; she made sure I understood, as much as I could, the terrible cost a virus had exacted, not only from her and her family, but for life as it then was. Nothing was ever the same after that.
My friends, I assure you that my grandmother, Della Josephine Noggle Davis, would have done anything on earth to save her mother and the rest of her family from the horrors of the 1918 flu, and from all that followed.
Me, with my maternal grandparents, Bill and Della Davis.
Follow the science. Listen to public health authorities. Won’t you do it for Della?
I have actually been in lockdown since March 3, I think. Because I have extremely severe asthma, I got worried and decided to start working from home. Only a few days later, almost everyone at WHO started working remotely.
Oddly, I have written almost nothing about this strange new world we find ourselves in. I decided today that I must settle down and get some creative work going, in addition to my work-work.
We are still able to go out for walks near our houses, as long as we have the official form from the French government that explains why we are out: “walking dog” would seem to be fairly self-evident, according to Poppy and Ivy.
My friend Alice is staying with me, as she has been undergoing cancer treatments and all the friends who were scheduled to come and stay with her have had to cancel. I am so grateful that she is here, as I think I would have gone bonkers already if I had to be alone. Our friend Bex from Paris is working at WHO and has switched over from living with me to living at Alice’s and taking care of her cats.
Our saving grace so far is that we have been able to go out for walks and the weather has been so beautiful it hardly seems real. This week it is meant to get a bit colder.
First we walked through the center of Ferney, which was nearly completely deserted.
Today was grey and cold, but we had a wonderful walk until we learned that we were in a park that was officially closed! We found a sign that said, STAY AT HOME! THIS PARK IS CLOSED! AND THERE IS A 135 EURO FINE FOR BEING IN IT! Sez I, the town really should put a sign up at both entrances to the park 😉
Poppy and Ivy enjoyed themselves hugely, even though it was all forbidden.
I took Poppy out of her puppy carriage and she went for a RUN!
Coming up: lockdown recipes, amusements, projects. Bon courage to all!