When we first went to Afghanistan, we stayed in a guesthouse called Chez Ana on Passport Lane. It was a quiet street that began at the passport office on Salang Wat, and Ana’s was at\u00a0a little crook\u00a0in the dirt road.<\/p>\n
Ana was from Croatia, and she did what she could to deal with the hodge podge of foreigners who’d descended in 2002 to rebuild Afghanistan. Sometimes her dark eyes would get huge and she’d\u00a0scream at the staff.<\/p>\n
Chez Ana’s had\u00a0a guard, but Kabul\u00a0wasn’t dangerous then. I don’t think the guard\u00a0even had a gun. I walked 20 minutes to work, and Afghans\u00a0smiled and waved and shouted\u00a0hello.<\/p>\n
From the yard at Chez Ana’s, and from the rooms with the windows opened, you could hear metal clanging. It started not long after dawn and went on all day and into the evening.<\/p>\n
It was a pleasant sound, thick and thin tones weaving around each other, rhythmic but human. A kind of music. I liked hearing it at the end of the day. It hammered in a sense of accomplishment, like\u00a0things were coming together.<\/p>\n
The metal music\u00a0was coming from one\u00a0street over. It was where all the metal trunks in the city were made and sold.<\/p>\n
The designs were hammered in by hand. The men used whatever they had to make the designs. They worked steadily but they stopped when a foreigner appeared,\u00a0and they had beautiful smiles.<\/p>\n
We got\u00a0a metal trunk, and used it while we lived there. The trunk followed us\u00a0to Dubai when we left, and then to Georgia when we came back to the U.S.<\/p>\n
In these nine years, while things fell apart in Afghanistan, the trunk has been in my office, on the art studio side.<\/p>\n
I kept bulky photo albums inside of it – Syria and Turkey, China and Vietnam, Seattle and Afghanistan. The trunk is so heavy I can’t move it. I stored it under a table out of the way and never opened it.<\/p>\n
The mess from the\u00a0water damage<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0re-plumbing<\/a>\u00a0has forced me to redecorate my office, and it’s time\u00a0to lighten up the\u00a0space. Too much stuff that I never use, too many unfinished projects weighing me down.<\/p>\n I took the photo albums out of the Afghan trunk and carried them upstairs to go to storage. Then I brought the trunk up separately.<\/p>\n The trunk is light; the metal is just tin.<\/p>\n I wonder what happened to its maker.<\/p>\n Today’s penny is a 2002, the year I first heard\u00a0the music of\u00a0the trunks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When we first went to Afghanistan, we stayed in a guesthouse called Chez Ana on Passport Lane. It was a quiet street that began at the passport office on Salang Wat, and Ana’s was at\u00a0a little crook\u00a0in the dirt road. Ana was from Croatia, and she did what she could to deal with the hodge … read more Heavy metal<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8082,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[320],"tags":[109,110,82,1004,1005,32,1003,20],"class_list":["post-8206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-shelter","tag-109","tag-afghanistan","tag-beauty","tag-chest","tag-kabul","tag-metal","tag-tin","tag-tom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8206"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8230,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8206\/revisions\/8230"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}