My Grandmother - Countess and Artist

Shosho.

(grandmother in Kikuyu)

This woman was born a Countess in a pre-war world of horse-drawn carriages and castles for every season. How is it that she now lived in the wild African bush, speaking only Swahili and teaching children how to dig wells, plant for droughts, and learn the trades?

Eighty-five years of survival, love, and adaptation is how something like that happens. She carried 3 passports, lived on 4 continents, and spoke more languages than I know.

She described her first memory to me as a long day of travel in a horse-drawn carriage at the age of four to what she now called "their Summer Castle," where she was greeted by 40+ house staff before being taken up to her room, which had a coal-filled metal bed warmer in her ornate chambers.

Fast forward to 1945, when her family was living in downtown Dresden as the war raged on. She was forced to flee the carpet bombing by the United States as the city she knew was diminished to rubble. She lost everything. This was when she walked for 12 miles in the frigid February snow before being found by French soldiers and taken to safety in France. When they were also invaded, she moved to Sweden, and toward the end of the war, she met a German translator.

After my grandfather led the interpretation section for the Nuremberg Trials, they married and headed to Kenya for a fresh start.

After agricultural school in Elderet, they moved with their two infant sons to a small coffee farm in northern Tanzania on Mount Kilimanjaro. She talked a lot about learning how to simply "do" life during this time—how to cook, clean, and move about without the lifestyle she was accustomed to pre-war.

My grandfather led tented safari trips that would last for weeks at a time while they produced small-batch, quality coffee and eggs. My father and his younger brother were split between boarding school and helping on the farm.

In 1972, crisis struck again. The farm was nationalized by the Tanzanian government, as were their bank accounts. They had only weeks to leave with nothing.

After selling a few heirlooms, they managed a trip to San Francisco to start another new life. Shortly after the move, my grandfather passed away from a heart attack (or a broken heart), and my grandmother had big decisions to make. She tested out running prop-plane photography safaris in India before realizing her childhood dream of becoming an artist.

She spent decades in Manhattan painting and gold-leafing large works before, at 75, deciding she needed—and wanted—to be back in Africa, giving back what she could. So she sold it all, and 10 years into her adventure, she was crying happy tears over the humble jar of mayonnaise I brought her. Life is wild.