Travels With Glenda

from Jacqueline

I had another email from my friend Glenda this week, along with some photos taken high up in the mountains of Darjeeling, where she is working at a school run by an elderly Jesuit priest. The photos are gorgeous, with Glenda standing on the terraced gardens she and the children are creating on a steep hillside surrounded by a clinging mist. It’s almost like one of those old sepia photographs, except that she’s holding a flowerpot with a bright orange bloom of something that looks like a marigold.



There’s another photo with Glenda standing by a bus. This is an important shot, as the funding for that bus had dried up when she first arrived back at the school a month or so ago, so she and the children had to walk about 10 kilometers each way up and down the mountain, and Glenda had to put in a full day’s work as both head gardener and art teacher.



Glenda’s pilgrimage began in the spring of 2004 – no, that’s wrong, it actually began a few years earlier, when she realized how much her job as a real estate agent in California was driving her crazy. Sure, she was doing well, and sure she had managed to set up her grown children in their own homes, but something was missing. Something akin to having her her soul touched every day.

In her past lives, Glenda has been a teacher and actress, has traded in vintage clothing, and lived in places as far flung as Afghanistan and Alberta, and even had a cross burned in her garden in Alabama for daring to produce a play for African American kids – she must have been all of twenty-three at the time. I met Glenda when I lived in England, where she spent most of her adult life before returning to the States so that her son could experience living in the country where she was born and raised. Then she stepped onto the real estate merry-go-round.

With her 60th birthday looming, Glenda knew she wanted to do something big, to discover some new things about herself, perhaps – and she knew that such learning can only come with pilgrimage. Now, we all know that a pilgrimage doesn’t have to take you far from home, but she’d had a yearning all her life to travel the route of the Old Silk Road. Of course she wavered, so as I had my own plans for that year – a trip to the Great War battlefields of The Somme and Ypres – I suggested that we set off together so that she’d have someone to take that first step with.

After London, we went to Sicily with our friend Vicki and her friend Stephane, then when I left the group to go on my way, Glenda returned to London to start the process of gathering the necessary visas. And off she went. With her one suitcase and a lot of courage, over the course of a year Glenda traveled through 14 countries, braving hours on buses teetering on the edge of cliff-faces in Turkey, four hour walks between visa checkpoints in Uzbekistan, monsoons in Vietnam and severe sickness in Thailand. Her emails – often hilariously funny – spoke of a journey of the soul, and I can still remember that email from India when she said that she was on her way up to a school-orphanage in the hills of Darjeeling, which she heard had been founded by a Jesuit priest who was now old, so he needed help. She stayed there for weeks, leaving only when the rains came. She returned to the States to welcome new grandchildren into the world, then went back to India, and that’s where she is now, undertaking back-breaking work to create gardens for the children.

I have no idea why I’ve written about Glenda today, though those photos from India have remained in my mind’s eye since I received them. Her communiqués have captivated a very long list of recipients since she embarked upon the journey to find out who she might find herself to be as a woman reaching a certain age. And this whole posting has absolutely nothing to do with the literary, though it has much to do with life – because that’s what I can see in my friend’s eyes as she plants marigolds while surrounded by kids at a school in Darjeeling.