Sula Marin June 4, 2016

I am a great-aunt again.  My sister’s daughter Molly gave birth to a girl on June 2 and christened her Sula, after my maternal grandmother, and Marin, as in this spectacular county.   It was a fascinating choice, tethering this dark-haired newborn to her long ancestry in farmlands of Pennsylvania and, perhaps, to future generations within the agriculture of West Marin.

Sula “the first” was Pennsylvania Dutch and spoke that dialect when she was a girl growing up in the country.  The one photo we have of Sula as a child shows her on the farm with her mother Sarah Eckhart Lazarus, with whom I bear an uncanny resemblance. 

We never could figure out where the name “Sula” came from, and suspect it was just a “made-up” name.  There is, of course, the fictional character Sula in the book of that name by Toni Morrison, written long after the birth of my grandmother.  There is also Sula sula, the genus and species for the red-footed booby (smallest member of the booby genus Sula), which I discovered to my great surprise at the Cal Academy of Sciences one day in San Francisco.  Surely my grandmother’s moniker could not have derived from a bird found in the Galapagos, but an intriguing anecdote just the same.

I look forward to meeting Sula “the second”.  I have my grandmother’s old recipes, some written in Dutch, a few old books, and some lovely rings that I hope to share with my grandniece some day.  I want to tell her about the ribbon candy my grandmother always placed in a glass dish at Christmas, the homemade coconut and peanut butter chocolate eggs she produced on Easter, the white Chiclets that she pulled from her black leather handbag when we were on outings, and the scent and taste of homemade bread that emerged from her tiny kitchen.  And of course, I hope that young Sula Marin will love the land of her middle namesake and come to visit me here often.