My days are woven of past and present, real and imaginary.
Today I continue to invent the story of a young couple trying to avoid the trading and smuggling schemes of the English and Dutch settlers living between the Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River, which they called the South River, in the 1670s. Not too far away, in colonial New York, a Dutch family with three young children, begins building a business in dry goods and learning the ways of a new life in America.
Henlopen Family of Amsterdam
A couple of times during the day, I dipped into Russel Shorto’s history of colonial New York, The Island at the Center of the World, to help me picture the world of my Dutch Lopen family and their neighbors.
After I had already begun to imagine this family as the Lopers a couple of years ago, we went to Amsterdam and saw this portrait in a Dutch Canal House Museum. Travel weaves in more colors.
I shared my colonial stories with a group of writers this afternoon, and they also shared their worlds with me: a boy feeling the attractive pull of fascist power in Ethiopia, 1939. Medieval Irish kings jostling for power.
I’m thinking of children. First, of course, my grandchildren Maizy and Joe, who came over for brunch this morning. Then the Double Run colonial children: the Dutch Lopens, Agnes, Mary, and Michael. Finally, that vulnerable little six-year-old Ethiopian boy in my friend’s story.
This weaving of past and present, real and imaginary, is who I am, but much of the fabric is invisible to those I live with and talk to all day long.
