Print block

 In a letter to a cousin, my mother relates a tidbit about a cousin for whom she had great affection: 

"I do remember […] Edna Beck Kiesler. She had been a Christian missionary in India, and retired to Berkeley; my mother and I went to her house for tea one time, and the furnishings were the carved tables and screens she had brought from India. […] Edna was a lovely woman."

It made sense that my mother would be attracted to a remarkable, independent woman with a graduate degree: in addition to being a missionary, she was a PhD, and a mother of three children. The Beck family was known for their adventuresome streak, having come to California not overland from the east coast, but rather by ship from Tasmania. 

Edna herself writes a lovely letter to her aunt Jessie and Eugene Cutting, dated May 6, 1902:

"Thinking you would be more interested in hearing from me from my new home than from one of the numerous ports where we landed. I deferred writing until now, when I have had time enough to form a few notable impressions of this very foreign land.  You can imagine how one's former ideas are completely upset by meeting day after day conditions and circumstances so entirely opposite to one's training and environments.  To see camels travelling back and forth in front of one's home as often as one has heretofore seen horses; to drive along the street and find an elephant carelessly filling his spacious trunk with water, then transferring it quietly to the oesophagus, an elephant twelve feet high, then led away by a small boy not more than three and a half feet high; to find men dressed in attire resembling skirts and women wearing pantalons, all the things are a little bit startling! Do you wonder I needed some time to clear my wondering and amazed brain?

How thankful I was to reach the end of my journey-almost seven weeks long. My rest at Honolulu and visit with you was so delightful - it was like another taste of home. I was quite willing to prolong it.

[…a description of the trip, via Japan (Tokyo and Nagasaki), China (Shanghai and Hong Kong), and Singapore...]

We stayed in [Penang] port one day and then started for Calcutta - at the beginning of the new week we found ourselves landing at Calcutta, the city of palaces. Calcutta, a noisy, very dirty place - with few palaces, if any. My journey from Calcutta up through the country to Apere was made alone, lasting two days and two nights.

My new home is delightful - I am very fond of the work, the people, the country."

In my mother's art supplies was a hefty hand-carved wooden block used to print fabric. Given its typically Indian design and our family history, it is reasonable to believe that this block made the trip back with Edna when she returned to retire in her native California. 

Edna's print block and pattern rubbing