The former owner of the Park Slope’s Community Bookstore, Catherine Bohne, posted this wonderful letter on Online Journal from Albania. In it she describes the protests in Tirana, the capital, and also her new life in the Valbona Valley.
I found the writing so alive and so alluring. It’s positively novelistic in that magical way that Catherine has of describing her experiences. Do ya think she’s going to write a book about her exploits? Here’s an excerpts. You can read more here: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_6858.shtml
Thanks for Ezra, the new owner of the Community Bookstore for sending this around to the Community Bookstore email list.
In the world I come from, I have made a seemingly quixotic and possibly overwroughtly romantic and impractical choice. I have given away my business, sold my apartment for break-even, and moved with a few suitcases of random possessions to Albania — specifically to Northern Albania, the District of Tropoja, to this point possibly one of the most backwards, impoverished and forgotten regions of Europe. To absolutely damn the impracticality of my decision, I should add that I have no income, no plans for any income and no clear thoughts about what my future looks like. Nor am I of an age which lends itself to such a cavalier attitude to the future. In my world, I should be planning sensibly for senescence, I suppose. Well, I’m not.
So my compulsion then is to explain the actual sense of my decision — to communicate why I’m absolutely certain this is the wisest and most practical choice of my life to date. What is it about Albania? What is there here that I perceive, that is not in other places I have been? Something real and tangible that is worth more than whatever I may have given up? And what is it that I see, that I see that others from my world do not see, so that they so often seem to be rushing to help Albania lose exactly what it is that I see that makes it so precious? Something worth speaking up for? Something that is exactly what my world might well stand to learn? Or relearn, as it seems so often to have been forgotten.
Images flash through my mind, but resist organization. Point and counterpoint. Somehow, though, I think they add up to an answer, of some sort at any rate…
…Here’s one last picture. Just before we leave Kamenica, I am sitting in the snow on the edge of the wall surrounding the entrance to the house. One of the daughters of the house crouches beside me. Together we gaze out at the snow-covered hills, absolutely silent and gloriously empty. An enormous mockingbird plays in a frozen fruit tree, knocking lumps of snow to the ground. You like Albania? she asks. Oh yes, I say. I love it. I turn and we look into each others eyes, smiling happily. You? I ask. I watch her as she returns watching the mountains. Oh yes, she says, still smiling. Yes.