Second Dinner

I'm used to instant coffee, not by choice, but by adaptation. When I'm at home, I don't have a coffee pot, so I don't have coffee. But when I spent some time in Colorado with an unlimited supply of Kona beans- I drank several pots a day. Waking up at 4:30 to stoke the coal boilers, I'd get a pot going before starting the fires in the woodstoves. Then from 5:30 on, I'd sit with a Nalgene bottle full and watch the black night fade blue and eventually orange and pink. Finally the sun would come up over an eastern ridge near the Silverjack just about when someone was firing up the kitchen for breakfast. There were some great cooks living at the lodge where I was staying, and another half pot was the perfect finish to each home-cooked meal of the day. In the afternoons my friend Dick and I would cut wood a little further up the mountainside. Fall in Colorado is comparable only to fall in the hills and mountains of Virginia, and those golden afternoons bucking and splitting logs were the best memories of that time. As the fall wore on, the days grew colder and eventually we were working in a couple feet of snow. But the Kona beans never ran out and every afternoon we'd head uphill stuffed full of fried trout, green beans, fresh baked bread and cobbler- and we'd each carry a half pot of the black stuff with us.

But that was nearly eight years ago, and now I'm used to instant coffee because when we moved into this apartment we inherited, along with other odds and ends, a huge can of Nescafe. It's not as bad as the instant coffee I remember trying in the States, and gives a somewhat pleasant taste and a familiar aroma to a cup of hot water. However, unlike the Kona beans, my supply ran out two days ago and rather than interrupt my daily routine to go to the store (that's a Saturday task)- I dug through the cupboards to see what reasonable substitutes might be available. There was one pack of something called coconut coffee that was more like hot cocoa than coffee, a Maxwell House coffee bag that didn't produce much more than the requisite color, and tucked away in the back corner of a little drawer was a beat-up red bag holding the remains of a pound of Shenandoah Joe's Sumatra. Luckily it was already ground, saving me the trouble of hunting down a neighbor with a grinder, and all I had to do was be patient enough for the grounds to settle out after filling a jar with a few rounded tablespoons and some boiling water. It was delicious and a little later I had a second. Being, as I said, used to Nescafe- two cups of coffee in the mid-afternoon should not have been much of a problem. But this was not Nescafe and it was much of a problem. But not a bad problem- just a sleeping problem.

So here I am at 20 past midnight, full on a delicious second dinner of vegetable stew, baguette, and bananas, and enjoying John O'Brien's At Home in the Heart of Appalachia (thanks Smitty!) for the second time this spring. I guess it's better to be wide awake and enjoying sleeplessness than half-awake dreading the morning.

Two months later

It is March 20th, a fine warm day in the city, and though all the earth within sight is brown- the smell on the breeze every now and again hints that spring is here. The birds outside chatter happily, Shinay naps peacefully on the couch, and I'm ruminating over a cup of instant coffee.

Over two months have passed since we left this city and my mind is still making sense of everything that the time held. From seeing my family on the Gulf Coast of Mexico to working construction with Gabe and painting with Ian, from spending time with friends and family in DC and Lynchburg and at Virginia Tech to seeing the new president inaugurated- then flying off again for "home" in Asia- it was like looking at the past through a kaleidoscope- all these fractured colorful bits of life crammed into a tiny amount of time- and trying to work out what the pattern means or what the future holds or if there's any way to hold onto it all- all of the people and the places that we love, but knowing that every turn of the hand, every change in the light creates a new and ungraspable mosaic that is perhaps better enjoyed than figured out.

And then we landed. Here. In one piece of the mosaic that is a grey-brown, dusty city surrounded by low mud mountains. My friend Bill picked us up at the airport in his familiar style, playing Journey and chatting the whole way back about some new revelation about life and how it all works. We passed by our usual Sichuan restaurant, my favorite noodle shop, the vegetable lady that Shinay always chats with. Mosaics within mosaics. Did they miss us? Did they wonder where we went? Four floors up with 100 pounds of bags each, into our quiet apartment. Thanks and goodbye to Bill.

And then it was just us again. In our own quiet, blue-colored, peaceful facet of the kaleidoscope. It felt good to have our own space. Our own time. Our own rhythms. To sleep in our own bed. To walk out and buy our own vegetables and cook our own dinner and do our own dishes. For a week we settled in, got registered with the authorities and with the school, put the apartment in order, found out who was in town and reconnected with folks. We were still in a daze from the whirlwind of the past two months, but happy to be with each other again. Before classes started, we decided to enjoy the togetherness that we'd missed and take one last trip before the demands of the spring resumed. We traveled through Xinjiang by train, connecting the dots of the eastern reaches of the Silk Routes from oasis town to oasis town. It was a wonderful adventure and returning made our home seem the more familiar and comfortable.

So here we are. Three weeks into being back in Asia, two days into classes and projects, several weeks into Spring by the Chinese reckoning. Now I'll stir fry some potatoes and onions and zucchini for a picnic with the neighbors and we'll enjoy a tiny March-afternoon-colored bit of what will one day be the memory of Spring 2009.