It’s my birthday this week and perhaps it was then so many days ago when it all started. The day I was born in Egypt, in Cairo, in a hospital near the Nile. I was born to parents who weren’t Egyptian but who were travelers and adventurers and do-gooders. And Egypt seemed as good a place as any other to settle down.
We moved from Egypt to Tunisia, spending our summers in Iran. We eventually would wind up in New York with a container filled with my parents’ strange loot from all the places that they had been.
Our home didn’t look like the homes of any of the neighbors. And my parents didn’t look like the parents of any of the other children. My father worked in Africa and persisted in wearing a khaki safari suit regardless of where he was. Meanwhile, my mother breezed about in caftans – her dark hair and brows a marked contrast to the blond soccer moms.
In my house, there were ethnic foods and ethnic friends and endless talks of programs to reduce poverty in far flung places.
That’s the way I grew up. And perhaps, really, nothing has much changed.
As an adult, I hit the road and moved and then moved again. From Washington to Senegal , from Bangladesh to Nepal , and from Namibia to Morocco. And it was here in Marrakesh that I settled down, as much a nomad can, and built Peacock Pavilions in an olive grove – my very own bohemian enclave filled with my own curious loot. I started this blog to chronicle my small tales, and I opened my shop to showcase my tribal treasures. And because that wasn’t enough, I founded Project Soar – a social experiment in doing good. I was my parent’s daughter after all and I had married a man as crazy as I was.
It’s all grown organically, without rationale or a plan- everything scattered here and there on the web. But now….now a little order. My new site, M. Montague, that houses everything in one spot – my blog, my hotel, my shop, my nonprofit. A place for all the things that I am up to -- my fascinations, my travels, my obsessions, my products. A place for modern nomads everywhere.