In looking back over my life to compose this summary I realized that life didn’t go the way I intended and was full of unexpected experiences.  Despite my efforts to the contrary life and destiny steered me to where I was meant to be.  As said in one of my favorite meditations “Everything is as it should be”

COLLEGE:  I headed to Dartmouth intending to major in Math, having ruled out majoring in German because “the only thing you can do with a German major is teach, and no way (in h***) am I ever going to be a teacher”, and ended up majoring in Russian and teaching languages for the Department of Defense for 32 years.  One of my Russian professors became a mentor and friend, introducing me to linguistics and encouraging me to pursue an advanced degree in Slavic Linguistics.  Her enthusiasm for her subject in class was contagious and I tried to emulate that in my own teaching.

MARRIAGE:  Got married to an American guy of Russian background that I met at Russian summer school.  He turned out to not be the person I thought he was and fortunately I got out before we had any children.  In addition, my would-be mother-in-law died in January 1982, we married in September 1982 and my father-in-law died at the beginning of October 1982, leaving us to care for my two young sisters-in-law (they were 10 and 12 years old at the time) as well as my husband’s 82-year-old Russian grandmother. The girls and grandmother lived in a separate apartment for almost a year; the day before Thanksgiving 1983 their apartment building burned down so they all moved into our house.  In the summer of 1986 I worked at the Norwich Russian School in Vermont, and the space it gave me to reevaluate my situation was crucial.  I ended up enrolling in a Ph.D program in Slavic Linguistics at Brown University in the fall of 1987.  Our divorce was final in September 1989 and I’ve never looked back.

TRAVELS:  In 1979 I studied at Leningrad State University in the USSR and lived in a Soviet dormitory.  I made trips to Riga, Latvia, Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine and Moscow.  Living/travelling in the Soviet Union during the Cold War was quite an experience. Following the USSR program I spent a little over five weeks travelling in Europe on a Eurail Pass and staying in youth hostels (or taking an overnight train so we could sleep for free).  I visited Paris, Munich, Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck, took a day-long train journey around Switzerland (it was too rainy to do anything else), Amsterdam.  Copenhagen, a Rhine cruise, Pisa, Florence and Rome, Lausanne Switzerland, Bremen, Cologne and finally Brussels to fly home on Capital (for $172).

In 1988 I visited my brother’s family in Scotland; I spent a month teaching language at a naval base in Spain in 2000, with weekend excursions to Seville, Cadiz, Granada and Gibraltar; studied on a 6-week language program in Croatia (Zagreb and Dubrovnik 2003); river cruises with my mom in Russia (2004) and Belgium/Netherlands (2008).  Poland in 2016, and Puerto Rico 2019.

VOLUNTEERING: In 2018 I reconnected with Eagle Island Inc. and volunteered for a week at my old Girl Scout camp, Eagle Island, in Upper Saranac Lake.  It’s an historic Adirondack Great camp gifted to the Girl Scouts in 1937.  It was used as a summer camp until 2008 when the GS shut it down and tried to sell it.  A group of alumnae got together and after lengthy legal battles was able to purchase the island in 2015.  Having been unused for so many years it required major work to get it up and habitable again.  I spent an entire day of my volunteer week wire-brushing the rust off the burner elements while my sister got to scrape years of gunk from the exhaust fan/vents.  It was all worth it though, as the stove subsequently passed inspection saving the organization $30,000.  Eagle Island reopened as a camp in 2019 (skipping 2020 of course) and provides all-gender day-camp and girls’ sleepaway camp, in addition to special programming like the annual Alumni and Friends women’s weekend where campers from the 1950s through the 2000s have an opportunity to relive their camping days.  I never miss it.  I also volunteer with Eagle Island Inc as part of the tribute donation notification process.

LANGUAGES: I studied German at LHS, Russian in college and completed a master’s in Russian Language and Literature in a summer program, enrolled in Brown University for a PhD in Slavic Linguistics.  Studied Polish, Bulgarian, Russian and Linguistics.  Defended my dissertation (on a feature of Bulgarian phonology) in 1992 with the goal of leaving government employment and becoming a Russian professor somewhere.  Timing wasn’t good (end of the Soviet Union, etc.) so I ended up staying in government for a total of 32 years.  After 1991 I specialized in retraining Russian translators to work in Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian and Slovene.  I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to teach multiple languages had I been teaching at a university.  I also did a ten-week intensive course in Arabic as part of a development program.  And in retirement I am studying Ancient Greek with my 94-year-old cousin who was a Classics professor for 35 years.

I currently read literature and non-fiction in multiple languages: German, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Bulgarian. Thanks to the internet it is easy to order books from abroad.  I also look for foreign language reading material at used book sales, keeping an open mind so that if something is in a language I know I pick it up even if it’s not a subject I would have thought of reading on my own.  But I do draw the line at any of the Russian classics (I have most of those that I want). 

RESEARCH: From 2005 until I retired in 2014 (in addition to teaching) I worked on second-language acquisition research (as a government employee) at the Center for the Advanced Study of Language (CASL).  Following retirement, I was hired part-time directly by the University of Maryland to continue working on research projects.  Later I did consulting/research work from home on an independent contract basis. I wrote a specialized Ukrainian grammar; a short explanation of whether Montenegrin is a separate language or not (depends on how you look at it) and identified/documented Internet sites to collect 5 million words and 10 hours of speech in each of seven Balkan languages. 

As a result of my research work I presented my first (and only) academic paper at the 2016 Third Language Acquisition conference held in Vienna, sponsored by the International Association of Multilingualism.   I traveled with a CASL colleague who was also presenting a paper, and who invited me to join her for a five-day visit to her hometown (Boleslawiec, Poland) after the conference.  We stayed with her mother-in-law, and were chauffeured around by her cousins, none of whom spoke English, so I dusted off my theoretical knowledge of Polish (ca. 1988) and was speaking and understanding pretty well by the end of the trip.

INTERESTS: After leaving government service in 2014 I had the luxury of rekindling my long-time interest in music, art and embroidery.  I took nine years of piano lessons (after a 42-year hiatus); I joined the local Encore Creativity Chorale, a singing group for those over 50 run by professional musicians.  In preparation for our twice-yearly concerts, we rehearse weekly close by in Columbia, and after rehearsals a group of women get lunch together at a nearby restaurant. 

I took watercolor classes for a while at the local senior center but later switched to pastel classes at an art center.  Pastel classes were suspended in March 2020 due to Covid, but I’ve kept my hand in on my own.  I had two of my pastel paintings accepted into a juried show.  I did a series of pastel paintings of Eagle Island landmarks that I had printed on foam board and donated for the annual fund-raising auction. 

This past year I used my love of embroidery to keep me sane with the world going to **** and to help raise funds for Eagle Island during their annual auction.  I designed and stitched hand towels and dish towels with Island themes.  My contributions accounted for almost half the money raised by the auction. 

FAMILY: My siblings and I finished a lengthy family project started by my dad of transcribing and annotating our Great-great-grandmother’s journal from 1853-1858 when she was a teenager in Syracuse NY.  We included old family photos, and my brother (the history major) did the background research and annotations, my sister provided some contemporary photos of the region, and I designed and formatted the text and taught myself bookbinding (using YouTube videos) to produce six copies of “Josephine’s Journal”.

I also took on sorting and ‘deciphering the scrawl’ of letters (spanning years 1916 to 1995) written to my grandmother by her mother-in-law, her father, her first “boyfriend” serving in Europe in WW1, and other relatives. I enjoyed the ‘challenge’ of internet research to try to pin down the dates of letters with no postmark.  My ancestors helpfully headed letters with simply ‘Wednesday Morning’ or the like.  I scanned and ‘transcribed’ a few letters a day and sent them to my siblings for commentary, as well as tracking them all in spreadsheets. 

But our most significant and rewarding sibling collaboration was shepherding our parents through the last part of their lives.  We worked well as a team. My brother handled computers and investment matters, my sister bill-paying and medical issues, regular visits, I was in charge of ‘morale’ with regular visits, ordering books, word-search puzzles, clothes and flowers for Mom.  During Covid I put together a biweekly newsletter with pics and news from family FB posts that I mailed hard-copy to my parents and emailed to the Social Worker at their retirement facility to provide something for them to talk about.

Dad died in September 2021 but I was given special permission to visit him (COVID etc) just two days before.  Five days later we went ahead with a planned family canoe trip down the Delaware River and took Dad’s trusty old camping and canoeing hat along for the ride.  It was the perfect way to honor him.

I shared my life and home with two (not at the same time) wonderful ‘rescue’ dogs. The last one, Kelby, came with the ‘frisbee app’ already installed and was still playing catch a week before he died at almost 15.  He was my principal ‘Covid’ companion and helped me through that difficult time.

So even though my life didn’t go as I planned, it turned out to be what I was meant to do.  Another quote from my favorite meditation “No experience wasted” That is indeed true.

Wishing all of you health and happiness too.