Field Notes 7- Coffee und Suddan
Coffee and Suddan
An afternoon at the kitchen table.
I think many of my questions begin at kitchen tables.
Not necessarily with a big question.
Sometimes with coffee. With a calendar on the wall. With old family photographs. With things that have been standing in the same place for so long that, at some point, you forget to notice them at all.
My grandmother sat at this table.
We wanted to know what things had been like in the past.
How women worked.
Where they worked.
What they earned.
How they came to do the work they did.
So we asked questions.
And she told us.
About work, about plants, about the weather. About paths and places that perhaps no longer look the way they did back then.
As she spoke, I slowly began to realise how much knowledge is held within these kinds of conversations.
Not the kind of knowledge found in books.
But another kind of knowledge.
Where something grows.
When to set out.
What to collect.
How to make something.
How much something was worth.
Who used to do something.
Things that are so familiar to someone that they are often never written down at all.
Perhaps that was the beginning of my interest in women’s work.
Not the grand history.
But a woman sitting at a kitchen table.
And the realisation that an entire life can continue to live on through memories, objects, places, and small stories.
Suddan (Upper Styrian dialect) — to get worked up about something, complain and discuss it at length, without actually changing anything about it.
