Essays | Page 36 | The Common

Masks, Memory, and Memoir from the Ivory Coast

March 18, 2013 Essays, In House

“Salt,” I said to my brother, pointing to the white crystals sprinkled on the bookcase in our late father’s home office. “At least, I think it’s salt. If it were sugar, there’d be ants everywhere, right?”

Marc swiped his finger across a shelf and gamely stuck his finger in his mouth. “Yep, salt,” he said.

After moving my mother to an assisted living, I was packing up the remaining possessions in her apartment, including my parents’ African art collection.

I’d first noticed the salt in a closet where the overflow of masks, statues, carved wooden utensils, and other objects were kept. They had bought them in Côte d’Ivoire and surrounding countries in the late 1960s, when we lived in Abidjan, then the capital. My father, a Foreign Service officer, was posted there. It wasn’t hard to guess who had done the sprinkling. The ladies who looked after my mother were all from West and Central Africa. To someone, these objects, which my parents collected for their beauty or cultural interest, must have had a spiritual significance.

A Museum in the Mind of Someone Contemplating the Sky

March 12, 2013 Essays

By DALE MEGAN HEALEY

My sister remembers wondering, when she was a kindergartner, if the sky really looked like her classmates’ drawings of it: a blue stripe on the tops of their papers with white space separating it from the stick figures below. She remembers having a significant childhood realization when she looked out the window and saw that the sky was not only above her, but all around her. From then on, she colored her entire paper blue.

Doing a Dérive; Or, Walking 2.0

March 8, 2013 Essays

By JENNIFER ACKER

Late afternoon, late January. I need air, exercise, but my regular walk around Al Manhal Palace is too long; the construction en route to the Corniche too hazardous to navigate. I try to take comfort in the company of my own mind, but today I am a terrible person to be with. Wandering, uninspired, brain-stuck, I find myself in the middle of ten lanes of traffic on a median barely wider than a balance beam. Grumpy as all get out as hot exhaust blasts me by. I need to move, but I have nowhere to go.

Reading Place: Last Gasp of Winter

March 4, 2013 Essays, In House

By HANNAH GERSEN

This time of year, I’m always hoping for one last snowstorm or cold snap. I love winter, and am always sad to see it go. To give the season a proper goodbye, these links celebrate all things cold things cold and snowy:

Backlit Harbor (Pt. 2)

February 26, 2013 Essays

By ANNE WELCH

Sampling Thoreau

Part 2: Where I Live and What I live For

Inspired by rereading Thoreau’s Walden for the first time in 30 years, I am writing a series of essays—an attempt to sample Thoreau, and swing the rhythm. I want to honor the young idealist with echoes of his aphoristic style and, at the same time, challenge his lofty ideals with the experience of an older woman. Click here to read Part 1.

In the early years of our marriage, Andy and I used to rent a house for two weeks in the summer in Lubec, Maine, as far Down East as you can go and still be in the U.S. It was a canning town—sardines. We thought of it as a paradise that was our secret. We could ride our bicycles out to lighthouses in two different directions, walk through a bog full of the carnivorous sundew and pitcher plants and cross the bridge to Campobello Island, New Brunswick, where, sitting on the cliffs, we see could see Finback whales spouting and diving on the horizon. When we started going there, only one canning plant was still in operation. The last year we visited, that too was closed. On our walks through town, we found that nearly every other house was for sale; but when it came down to it, we couldn’t buy one. We’d always be from “away,” but we’d lose our status as strangers. And, there were the seven hours of highway between me and my sisters.

Dreaming of a Writing Room

February 19, 2013 Essays

By MAKHOSAZANA XABA

When I flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town and drove to Misty Cliffs, which Google described as a little village that lies on the mountain and on the beach, divided only by Main Road, between Kommetjie and Scarborough, roughly an hour from Cape Town, I had no idea what lay ahead. I was insulated in pain from a break up. Ten days of the sea, walking, and writing healed me. This mountaintop lounge, where I wrote “Sad whale-speak at Misty Cliffs” to keep this dream of a place alive, has been my best writing room, so far.

Annals of Mobility: Walking Places

February 18, 2013 Essays, In House

By SONYA CHUNG

In an early episode of MAD MEN, Betty Draper and her friend Francine are gossiping in Betty’s kitchen about their new neighbor, the scandalous Helen Bishop, divorcee and single mother.

Francine: Have you seen her walking, up there on tree ridge? Where the hell is she walking to?
Betty: (shakes her head as she smears cream cheese onto a celery stick) I don’t know.

Later, when all the ladies have gathered in the same kitchen for Sally Draper’s birthday party, they go around and share their honeymoon stories. Helen tells them she went to Paris.

Country

February 12, 2013 Essays

By MISTINGUETTE SMITH

I was raised Up South in the 1960s, and I heard grown folk talk about “country” as one of the worst things you could be:

Why you gotta act so country?
Girl, that is some sho ‘nuff Geechee backwoods mess.
Look at her country ass, thinking she cute in that mammy-made dress!

Interiors

February 4, 2013 Essays, In House

By HANNAH GERSEN

Last weekend I stopped by Film Biz Recycling, a thrift store that sells props previously used on the sets of TV shows, movies, and plays. It’s a place I’ve been curious about for years, having heard of vintage treasures to be found amidst its workaday prop items. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and upon entering was somewhat jarred by the hodge-podge of items, arranged with no particular logic. A toy piano stood next to a stodgy-looking coffee table, which sat beneath a shelf of Cuban cigar boxes and a framed copy of the rules of the board game “The Game of Life”. Across from this tableau, on the other side of the aisle, were an egg swivel chair (like the one in Sleepless in Seattle), a wooden 1950s baby blue high chair, and slew of fake flowers.

Buckminster: Profiles of Available Buildings, Governors Island

February 1, 2013 Essays

By SCOTT GEIGER

In the Upper Bay of New York’s harbor, there is a new urban island under construction. Technically, this project is a work of rejuvenation or, as professionals say, adaptive re-use. A military installation since colonial times, Governors Island hosted a U.S. Army base until the mid-1960s. Then the Coast Guard took over, operating there until 1997, when the federal government deeded the island to the City and State of New York. Good timing. The subsequent fifteen years saw New York City’s most radical re-invention since the invention of the elevator.