Ah! Spring!
By: susan peterson stamis
Tags: bathing suit, Berlin, fanny, foreign service, nature, purple blossoms, spring, state department, stomach, sunshine, tanning
Category: Uncategorized
Spring has arrived in the valley. The sweet little Verdins are sitting on their eggs, the Painted Lady butterflies are migrating to wherever they go, stopping by to rest on the big purple blossoms of the Texas Laurel in the garden. The aroma of the oncoming scorching summer of the Mojave Desert is wafting on the breeze and it’s time to think about heating the pool.
Oh, crap. It’s bathing suit season.
My mother was an avid advocate of the “airing out.” Here, my happy little fanny is being treated to the warm sunshine of Berlin in 1951 and the undershirt is rolled up a bit for maximum exposure. Essential Vitamin D production is in progress, and maybe this was the day that I first developed my life-long love affair with the sun, worshipping from below its magnificence, warmth, and marvelous, slenderizing tanning properties.
I look at this photo with overwhelmingly mixed emotions, laughing and crying and feeling a bit sick to my doughy stomach as I realize that, 60 years after the day of the snapshot, my current body eerily resembles the one in the picture.
Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year have blown by in a blur. The Season of Self-Delusion is once again upon me. I squeeze my fluffy self into a “figure flattering” swimsuit, swath it from the neck down in a silky sarong and ignore the mirrors as I march towards the sunshine.
On the way out, I grab my hat.
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About Me
My father was a Consular Officer in the United States Foreign Service. He was first stationed in post World War II Berlin, where I was born in 1950. Subsequently, we lived in the Philippines; Jamaica; Guatemala; Washington, DC; Greece; Ceylon and Mexico; visiting many places in between. I was reared by my parents and nurtured by the various amahs, nannies, and housemaids who, every two years or so, entered and exited my little life.
I was educated in American Schools in “foreign lands,” but the most fascinating classrooms were the exotic locales where we lived, and the most inspiring teachers were the colorful people of those exotic and ancient cultures.
The bi-annual “home leaves” which my family spent at my grandparents’ homes in Los Angeles, California provided a sense of constancy to our nomadic lifestyle. My many aunts, uncles and cousins lived there and I eagerly looked forward to those vacations. We were 1st and 2nd generation Greek Americans (all 4 of my grandparents had immigrated at the turn of the century), and thus had foreignness stamped onto us even though we were Americans.
Two of my father’s siblings were also in the diplomatic service, and we world-traveling cousins were a source of endless curiosity to our domestic counterparts when we came home speaking English with unusual accents, reducing the statesiders to hysterics.With his various cameras, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, 16 millimeter, Super 8 and Polaroid, my father rarely lost an opportunity to document the events unfolding around us. After years of waiting patiently in boxes under the stairs, these photographic records are now fulfilling their purpose as mnemonic retrievals of my little life.
Mnemonic Retrievals 
Now that’s hot!
Cute as a button!
You’re so darn happy