favorite things, spring thaw

My favorite things about my job are my students, bless them, the two English teachers at my school (before a frustrating three-hour meeting during which nothing was accomplished, Zhopar said in English across the table “I am ready to run away now.”), my host family, especially when something really funny happens and we all sit laughing with our chai sloshing in the cups. And days like today, the cream of spring. Warm, breezy, and the air in the city is fresh. The weather really is fine with me. Even in winter, the days are bright and the snow is clean, if inconvenient. And the mud seasons are so astoundingly muddy I’m willing to go through them, just for the sake of my mental story file. The Chapayeva volunteers have a video clip of the thaw (a week or so earlier in the south of the oblast, on the steppe), which looked like the day after the Flood. There was water ankle deep, at least, everywhere. I mean it. The village was like a kiddie pool. At least there isn’t as high a proportion of cattle there as there is in Akzhaiek, Tim’s village, which had just as much water and mud, and a lot more, um, I’ll let you imagine.

I wasn’t there during or after the thaw. Amber and I went a couple weeks before, when the ice was thinning slightly, but wasn’t quite gone. Common foot paths are like SuperMario – you have to jump a certain stone – the one that doesn’t sink when you put weight on it, and from there to the dry spot on the right (but duck, so you don’t klonk your head on the branch). Then, when we came to the broad icy patch, I took the wrong way and had to shuffle across it, double-time, as my feet left deep spider-web cracks. Being independent, I also took the wrong way across what looked like a rink (I believe it was supposed to be a road), and by the time I was in the middle of it, my feet plunged through with each step. Some locals stood and watched me for the full minute it took me to reach the other side. The cows looked at me like I was stupid. Tim and Amber laughed and walked around the edges. My Health scores must be pretty low. Tim and I took a walk around the village the next morning, in the mean sleet, the kind that doesn’t even melt on your face. Amber, being an intelligent person, backed out. We started walking across an intersection, and it creaked when we were a long way from safety. Tim took off doing the shuffle-run and made it to the other side. I thought about getting on my stomach and throwing Tim my belt or something to drag me across (isn’t that what you do in quicksand?) but we both made it. We passed the usual village sites: the junkyards with broken-down tractors, the greenhouse skeleton, the indoor bazaar skeleton, the few small stores that sell eggs, bread, candy, and meat, the mayor’s office, and the library. We came to the edge of the village, where I was relieved to see exposed dirt by the bank (a very deep, steep bank) of the river. I leaped toward it, trying to avoid the very slick and shallow ice that was my other option. It had escaped my mind that wet clay is also slippery. Again, I almost wiped out. It would have been lovely, I would have been covered, it would have been thick and obvious. Maybe next year.