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102 pages

English

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The story of an American expatriate woman, with one chapter for each place she lived, revealing how she made herself at home throughout the world.
This book is the story of a well-traveled and well-informed American expatriate woman, Sybilla Green Dorros. It’s recounted in chapters — one for each place she lived — starting in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and ending in San Diego, California. While the bookend chapters are set in the United States, most of the locations are global. Four of them involved assignments with her family of origin (her parents and the earlier ones with her two sisters): Paris, Léopoldville, Accra, and Casablanca. Two were on her own: Rome and her first stint in Geneva. The last two, and the longest sojourns spanning nearly a quarter century, were in Manila and back in Geneva with her family by marriage (her husband and three children). Each relocation — to disparate countries at different stages of her life — presented new sets of challenges. This book reveals how she tackled these challenges and how she felt — and continues to feel — at home almost anywhere but with nowhere to truly call home.

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Biography

Autobiography

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Publié par	AuthorHouse
Date de parution	22 décembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781665576550
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Making Myself at Home in the World
My Life’s Journey on Four Continents

Sybilla Green Dorros

AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: 833-262-8899

© 2022 Sybilla Green Dorros. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/16/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7654-3 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-7655-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022922299

Cover stock imagery © Getty Images. All other images supplied by the author.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
To my grandchil dren:
Hannah, Noah, Eliza and Sa muel
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Hearth and Home
Chevy Chase (April 1946 – September 1956)
Chapter 2: The City of Lights
Paris (October 1951 – April 1952)
Chapter 3: The Heart of Darkness
Léopoldville (October 1956 – December 1958)
Chapter 4: The Gold Coast
Accra (September 1960 – September 1961, plus Summer 1962)
Chapter 5: The Eternal City
Rome (September 1961 – June 1963)
Chapter 6: As Time Goes By
Casablanca (Vacations 1963 – 1967)
Chapter 7: Homeward Bound
Temporarily (1963 – 1972)

Chapter 8: Pearl of the Orient
Manila (August 1972 – March 1986)
Chapter 9: Back to the Future
Geneva (April 1986 – July 1995)
Chapter 10: The Long Road Home
Forever (July 1995 – Present)
Epilogue
INTRODUCTION
Dear Reader,
Growing up, I knew only one of my grandparents: my widowed maternal grandmother, Elsie Mendell Hall. As you will discover in my early chapters, Grandmother Elsie played an important role in my young life. As a child, I learned bits and pieces about her from overheard conversations. Two of the things that stayed with me were that she was a college graduate and a Latin teacher. Most of my elementary school friends’ mothers and grandmothers were stay-at-home moms. While I understood my grandmother was unusual, it never occurred to me to ask her about the details of her life.
I wish I had known Grandmother Elsie when I was older and while her memories were still intact. (She suffered from dementia and spent the last 18 years of her life in nursing homes.) Born in 1880, she had witnessed firsthand so many momentous historical events: the women’s suffrage movement, two world wars, the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, and the Great Depression, just to name a few. I would have liked to have asked her how these events had affected her personally. Her life spanned nearly a century — she died one week short of her 97 th birthday — and I regret not having heard her tell her personal stories.
I wanted a different legacy for my own grandchildren. Over the years, we’ve spent time together in their hometowns (Portland, Oregon, and Houston, Texas) and in San Diego, where they visited me nearly every summer from the time they could fly as unaccompanied minors until the pandemic hit. My grandchildren will undoubtedly have good memories of the times we shared, especially Hannah, who traveled with me to France, Switzerland, and Iceland when she was 12. While we’ve never been at a loss for conversation, like me with my grandmother, they’ve never heard many of the stories of my past.
I decided I should document my stories for them, and for all my friends, who constantly tell me, “You should write a book!” whenever they hear a snippet about some faraway place. Unsure of where to begin, on January 25, 2020, I started attending weekly memoir writing classes through San Diego Writers, Ink. (This was the same week that the CDC confirmed the first coronavirus case in the U.S. but before widespread acknowledgment of a global pandemic.) I learned in our initial class that I was not actually writing a memoir (typically covering just a portion of a person’s life) but an autobiography, from my birth to the present. This turned out unwittingly to be my pandemic project.
And what a project it was! As you will see, I’ve recounted my life in chapters — one for each place I lived — starting in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and ending in San Diego, California. While the bookend chapters are set in the United States, most of the locations are global. Four of them involved assignments with my family of origin (my parents and the earlier ones with my two sisters): Paris, Léopoldville, Accra, and Casablanca. Two were on my own: Rome and my first stint in Geneva. The last two, and the longest sojourns spanning nearly a quarter century, were in Manila and back in Geneva with my family by marriage (my husband and three children). Each relocation — to disparate countries at different stages of my life — presented new sets of challenges.
Some of you, dear Readers, make an appearance in this autobiography. You may feel slighted that you were not given a larger role or, worse, believe you were wrongly portrayed. Please remember that this is the story of me . It’s told from my perspective — what I remember and what I felt. While I have written my story primarily for my grandchildren, I hope others will appreciate it as well. I trust, in reading it, you will see how I was transformed on my life’s journey. Perhaps you will come to understand how I felt — and continue to feel — at home almost anywhere but with nowhere to truly call home.
Happy reading, Sybilla
San Diego, California
July 1, 2021
CHAPTER 1
Hearth and Home
Chevy Chase (April 1946 – September 1956)
H ome. It’s a small word — only four letters, but perfectly balanced with two consonants and two vowels. Its aspirated sound is often not much louder than a whisper. But it speaks volumes. So much meaning is embedded in this one word. It can connote a geographic location, like a country or a town, or a specific dwelling place. It has spawned innumerable popular sayings, like “Home is where the heart is,” and “There is no place like home.” For me, 3803 Bradley Lane, Chevy Chase, Maryland, was home — both a hometown and a residence — for the first 10 years of my life. At the time, the child that I was didn’t understand the significance of this. I just knew it was where I lived with my parents and two older sisters from the day I was brought home from the hospital.
It wasn’t until I started living overseas that the concept of home began to crystalize. The farther I traveled and the longer I stayed away, the more important Chevy Chase became as a symbol of something greater than a two-story house on Bradley Lane. And it was during these extended absences that I learned in heartbreaking ways what it meant to be “homesick.”
It was a longing for a place and a house, yes, but above all, a longing for the naïve little girl who had not yet been torn from her moorings and who had not yet had to adjust and adapt to what seemed to be countless new places.

3803 Bradley Lane, Chevy Chase, Mary land
The house at #3803 was white-shingled with green shutters and a Southern-style front porch that wrapped around one of its sides. It was built in 1912. The graveled driveway that exited off Bradley Lane split in two, one section going straight back toward the detached garage and the other curving slightly up to the front steps of the house. Along the driveway to the house was a low hedge of boxwood, evergreen shrubs often planted in elegant and formal gardens in Europe but that seemed perfectly suited to our front yard. The hedge was the right height for jumping over, even though at certain times of the year, its aroma was unappealingly pungent. There were five steps leading up to the front door. One of my favorite photographs is of Grandmother Elsie and me at about five years old sitting on the second step; she is reading a book to me, and for once in a photo, I am not frowning.

With Grandmother Elsie, circa 1951
The front door opened into a foyer with a staircase that went up to the second floor. It was sparsely furnished, with just an upright piano to one side, a rug, and a small table by the side of the front door with a silver tray for the calling cards of visitors. This Victorian tradition had died decades earlier, but the tray remained as a symbol of what it meant to live an upper-class life. The living room was to the left off the foyer and the dining room to the right; both rooms had front-facing windows, with the kitchen and pantry hidden away behind the dining room.
Upstairs were five bedrooms: one for my parents, one for each of my sisters and me, and a guest room that was occupied several months of the year by Grandmother Elsie. I don’t remember anyone else ever staying there. The six of us shared one bathroom on the second floor, supplemented by a small powder room downstairs. An unfinished attic was used for storage, and an unfinished basement for laundry, which was done with an old-fashioned wringer washing machine. There was no dryer; clotheslines ran the length of the basement, and a small room off to the side had an ironing board and iron. Five days a week, our maid, Susie Townsend, did the housework, laundry, and cooking, as well as took on the role of nanny: giving us snacks when we came home from school and making sure we did our homework.
I loved my bedroom. The walls were painted pale yellow, and it had windows on two sides, one overlooking the backyard, which had a square trellis and garden beds of roses, and the other