The Purple Mango Post

Photographs, dispatches and writing by freelance journalist Corinne Purtill

I Love Morocco!

We've been here less than 12 hours, and already I love it. Can't wait for the next day. Actually, for the next year.

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The Adventure Begins

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2010 is starting with an adventure. 

Tomorrow, my husband and I are leaving for Morocco to visit some bad-ass friends who live there. After 10 days, my husband leaves for a business trip, the bad-ass friends leave for India, and I stay on to house sit for them and work on my book from the quiet of their apartment. Then, at the end of January, I'll meet up with my mom for her first trip to Europe. 

I am so excited. Expect updates and photos in this blog. And wherever in the world you may find yourself celebrating, happy new year to you!
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Powerful (Shmoop) Women

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Flannery O'Connor with her pet peacock. 

Shmoop has posted three of my biographies today: Emily Dickinson, George Eliot and Flannery O'Connor. I love that this three all happen to be iconoclastic women - all spinsters, all writers, all broads who knew perfectly well the speculation and gossip they provoked and just did not give two shits. 

There is George Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans), atheist and free love advocate, who lived happily with her partner George Lewes for twenty years despite the fact that they never married.

Flannery O'Connor lived at her remote Georgia farm, tending her beloved peacocks and fueling herself on cocktails of coffee and Coca Cola, until a degenerative form of lupus took her life at the age of 39.

And of course there is Emily Dickinson, quietly penning poems in her room, floating around town in her dress of white, and talking her poor stunned visitors' ears off on the rare occasions she accepted a caller. 

Here's to you, ladies. Thanks for making it easier for all of us to follow our own paths. 
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Orchard House and The Wayside

Had some technical difficulties with the last post - let's try this again!

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Concord

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One of the coolest real estate transactions in literary history is the sale of Hillside, the home of the Alcott family, to Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of the Scarlet Letter and the head of a young family. Louisa May Alcott, her three sisters and her Transcendentalist parents lived for several years in the Hillside, the distinguished, gabled house below, until they sold it to Hawthorne, who renamed it the Wayside. The Alcotts instead moved about 100 yards down the street to a new house on a former apple grove, which they called Orchard House.

My aunt and I toured Orchard House on Monday, which has been lovingly preserved with much of the original furniture and artwork the Alcotts had when they lived there. Fans of Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women (or of the 1994 movie, one of my all-time favorites) will instantly feel at home. While the events in the book are inspired by memories of the girls' lives at Hillside, Alcott used Orchard House as the inspiration for the March family's home. 

The original Alcotts were more ingenious and progressive than even their fictional counterparts. Patriarch Bronson Alcott built his house so that they would have both indoor water and a constant source of hot water (both rarities in those days, particularly for a family always short on money). They also encouraged their daughters' talents, sacrificing the Victorian tidiness that was all the rage in Europe to the cause of creativity. Artist May (Amy in the book) was allowed to draw on the walls of her bedroom, provided that her pieces become successfully better. Beth's piano still stands in the living room. In Louisa May Alcott's room at Orchard House, you can see the semi-circular writing desk her father built for her between two windows, where she wrote the book that made her - and her family - famous. 

Below, the gabled house is the Wayside; the building in the woods is the adult School of Philosophy Bronson Alcott built behind his home; details from Orchard House, decorated for Christmas; and a bit of Concord wintertime.
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Sleepy Hollow Cemetery: Part II

In addition to the famous occupants of Author's Ridge, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is also the resting place of generations of Concord residents whose names do not appear in history books, but who were treasured as mothers, fathers, children, friends. 

A walk through the cemetery on a snowy winter's day offers a sweet reminder of what we mean to one another. For all of the hats we wear and identities we assume in modern life, the layout of an 18th century New England cemetery tells us to whom, in the end, we really belong. Family plots offer a single common marker with the family's name - Keyes, Alcott, Smith - with small stones nearby honoring Mother, Father and their children who died young or unmarried. No dates, no accomplishments, sometimes not even any proper names - just markers showing who you belonged to, and who you loved. 

After viewing all of options in family monuments (nothing too wild; these are modest New Englanders, after all) I am convinced of this: the utter suitability of a bench as a final marker. I am not big on ornate mausoleums and monuments, but if you are going to have a physical memorial then I think the bench is a lovely idea. It's a way of being a good host even after you're gone. Would you like to rest a moment? Please, have a seat here on my bench. Sit a spell. Take a load off. Enjoy the view. Stay as long as you want. I'm not going anywhere. 

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Sleepy Hollow Cemetery: Part I

I spent the first part of this week with my wonderful aunt, uncle and cousins in Wellesley, Mass. My aunt and I have shared a lifelong bibliophile bond, and on Monday we made a pilgrimage together to Concord, the capital of American Transcendentalism. 

In the mid-1800s, a roll of Concord's citizens looked like a modern required reading list: Nathaniel Hawthorne bought his house from the Alcott family, who moved to a place down the street; Louisa May would walk from her family's home up the hill to borrow books from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who could be found dining with Henry David Thoreau. In a generous act of restraint, the town today celebrates its storied literary history without resorting to shameless tourist kitsch. You can still sense the special qualities that drew all these thinkers and writers to this New England town. 

We stopped at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (note: not the Sleepy Hollow of Washington Irving fame, which is located in Tarrytown, New York). Sleepy Hollow is the final resting place for all of the writers named above, as well as generations of Concord residents. They are all together on Author's Ridge: Louisa May Alcott, whose initials L.M.A. mark her place in the family plot; Emerson's stately monument; the simple marker in the Thoreau family plot that reads only "Henry." 

Henry David Thoreau died in 1862 at the age of 44, after a long struggle with tuberculosis. As it became clear the end was approaching, friends and neighbors were stunned by the calm acceptance with which he faced the end of his life. His journals, read after his death, explained the peace with which he greeted death. "For joy I could embrace the earth," the naturalist had written; "I shall delight to be buried in it."

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Photos Now at the Newburg Children's Museum

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Krueng children pump water at school in Nong Nek village.

Exciting news - Eight of my photographs from Ratanakiri are now part of a permanent exhibit at the Newburg Children's Museum of Natural History in Phelps County, Missouri!

The Newburg Children's Museum was founded and is run by the indomitable Dr. Elizabeth te Groen, a South African emigre with a background in esophageal cancer research and a passion for natural history. Dr. te Groen is also my grandmother-in-law (yeah, I know people). She is 85 years old, and could drink you under the table.  

The Children's Museum caters to a very underprivileged population in the Ozarks. For its humble surroundings and bare-bones budget, its exhibits are pretty great - for example, the Sky Room has a planetarium, a scale model of the solar system and photos from the Hubble telescope. And if you like rocks, you will love this museum. Its founder is a rock fanatic - not many grandmothers arrive for their grandchildren's weddings equipped with a nice dress, fancy shoes and an empty suitcase to collect specimens.

So if you find yourself in the Ozarks on a Tuesday or Saturday morning, stop by the Newburg Children's Museum. Or you can always schedule a personal tour with the Doctor herself. Tell her hello for me.
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Much to Be Thankful For

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We are still recovering from a whirlwind holiday weekend - actually, a whirlwind holiday week. We spent a stunningly beautiful Thanksgiving Day at the midtown apartment of some dear family friends of my husband's.  We sat at a gorgeous table, ate a delicious meal off of their wedding china and had a conversation that involved listening to what other people said AND letting them finish their sentences. They even had salad! (I had to turn it down when offered. I have never eaten anything green on Thanksgiving, and I don't intend to start now.)

It was a great day. At the same time, I felt a little twinge whenever I thought about my big, loud, extended family seated at a long table across the country, shouting over each other and scarfing stuffing and canned cranberry sauce off turkey-stamped paper plates. The joy of the expanded family you inherit when you get married is tempered by the fact that you spend less time with the family you grew up with. I wish there was a way to make it all work - to somehow shrink the country so that it would be possible to eat a mid-afternoon Thanksgiving meal with one side in New York and join the relatives in California for leftovers in the evening. 

We went around the table to say what we were thankful for. Apart from our hosts' charming 4-year-old daughter, who became the first person in American history to give thanks for Coney Island, everyone's gratitude revolved around people - new relatives who have come into our lives  via marriage, parents who are still able to travel long distances for the holidays, spouses who have stuck by one another through the ups and downs of the year. I'm grateful for all of those things too. Just as I am that there are places on both sides of the country that I can call home. 
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