Growing up the daughter of poor Panamanian immigrants, I never had a garden. Then in college, I read Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, and to have a garden took on a new meaning for me. It became a metaphor for rooting myself and my work in the long history of Black-women activism, creativity, and the art of manufacturing possibility in the cracks between race, gender, and class that others ascribed to you. Walker's book is full of lush, powerful prose, but almost every Black woman I know can recite this line by heart: "Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength-in search of my mother's garden, I found my own."
In the summer of 2020, the United States saw the biggest protest movement in American history in Black Lives Matter. It was a hard summer, one in which I often went to bed crying and woke up crying. It was also when my employer, the New York Times, gave me the opportunity of a lifetime: to work in one of its foreign bureaus. So with social upheaval and a pandemic raging in the United States, my husband, daughter, and I moved to London.
This story is from the October 2022 edition of Elle Decor US.
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This story is from the October 2022 edition of Elle Decor US.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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CURTAIN RAISER
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The Empire Strikes Back - A 19th-century gem in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gets a tour-de-force restoration thanks to Frances Merrill of Reath Design.
Is it possible to simultaneously go back in time and leap forward? This was the challenge a couple set for themselves upon purchasing a salmon-pink 1869 house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from Longfellow House, the National Historic Site that served as George Washington's headquarters during the revolution. We loved all the beautiful old details of this house, the homeowner says.
Just Like That, But Cheaper. -One writer tried to replicate a classic ELLE DECOR interior in his apartment. Could he do it for $500?
It was all about the green curtains. In 2008, to my great surprise, I was offered a ninemonth fellowship based in New York City. I had lived there twice before, both times unsuccessfully, meaning I had failed to create any kind of significant social life, and so this was a chance not only to do research for my new novel, but also an opportunity to get things right. I swore I wouldn't let the city break me a third time.
And How! - Decorator Nick Olsen transforms a Sag Harbor home into a Hamptons retreat with an irreverent humor.
If you must go to the Hamptons, however-because it is devilishly good fun, after all-you may notice an apparently modest, low-slung cottage on Sag Harbor's Main Street and think, with a comfortable sort of feeling, Now that is how a house should look. Nestled amid the Botox bars, helipads, and club-staurants, it could almost set the sordid world aright both a rebuke and a solution to the chaos that surrounds it. A real home.
