Fetch Me Home
Hi. I’m Alicia Bonner.
I write personal essays about my family’s espionage history, as well as economics, U.S. politics, and the general state of the world.
“Fetch Me Home” is named to honor my grandmother, Marjorie, who served for 15 years on the town board of Marbletown, NY, the township where she lived until her death, from 1977 to 1992. At some point in my childhood – either due to wet or cold, who can be sure – I was given one of Marjorie’s sweatshirts, which featured the town crest. Over the left breast was written the town motto: fetch me home.
Before Marjorie settled down to become a 4H leader and a town board member, she and my grandfather spent time abroad spying for the Soviets. It’s a remarkable story, and one I know deserves to be told.
As the only child of an early divorce, my young life was filled with turbulence and latent grief, the subconscious understanding that my childhood had been foreclosed by my parents’ personal choices. When I first christened this project at 31 years old, I’d lived in more than 22 places—32 if you counted each of the bedrooms I’d had for each year of boarding school and college, and the months I’d spent as an au pair in Spain and France, as well as working on a dude ranch in Durango, CO.
The idea of “home” felt both alluring and distant, something I hoped to one day claim but which felt eternally out of reach. Fetch Me Home was a perfect poetic double entendre – a link to my grandmother, and a concise summation of my life’s ambition.
At first, I dedicated Fetch Me Home to stories of Marjorie, who left an indelible mark on me. Born in 1911, she attended a women’s college and traveled widely before “settling down” to raise a family. A born leader, she proved to be a determined and effective community steward in everything from 4H “home economics” to land conservation. She survived two husbands and two World Wars, and when she died at 92, she did so with determination.
My grandmother is my point of origin and as such, my story is woven into hers. Her stories are my responsibility. The ovum that became me grew within the baby she carried more than seven decades ago. Her life gives me a mirror in which to reflect and more clearly see my own.
While I first began Fetch Me Home chronicling the story of my grandmother’s espionage career (which you can read about starting here), now I also write social commentary on everything from scarcity to capitalism to work, as well as personal essays, like this one, about what it takes to be poor in America.
Over the last 10 months as I’ve worked on this project, I’ve been frustrated by the absence of documented history. In attempting to piece together my grandmother’s early life, I’m fortunate to have an official document that chronicles both my grandparents’ testimony of their espionage activities abroad, but I desperately wish there was a more honest account of my grandmother’s ideas and experiences. I hope to leave my descendants a detailed record of my own life alongside a living history of our civilization.
We are standing at a threshold of important choices—for the environment, for our economy, and for our society as human beings sharing space on the planet. We get to decide who we will be, together. My hope is that Fetch Me Home will grow from a vessel for my personal and family history into a space that invites others to join me in holding up both the broken and beautiful places in the world around us so that together, we can find ways to heal these fissures and claim the fullest joy of life on planet Earth.
It won’t happen by accident. It has to happen on purpose. I hope you’ll join me for the discussion and the journey.
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