Seasons

It is hot.
The cold nights full of thunderstorms are long gone. It's almost as if mother nature saw how wet we all were and in an act of over-protective paranoia decided to swaddle us all up in suffocating layers of white hot sky. We're learning to go to be early and wake up early like everyone else, trying to make the most of the cooler hours of the day. It's actually a rhythm of life I'm really beginning to enjoy. Between noon and three everything stops. Shopkeepers pull their rope beds onto the porch and take a nap. Women lay in the shade of big trees and play with their babies. We sit in our tent and read.
People are beginning to harvest a few early crops like sesame. They are also beginning to prepare for the season of wildfires. Along with the coming drier weather and Harmattan winds come grass fires known for consuming entire mountainsides, and people's homes and farms along with it. In order to destroy the dry grass the fires feed on, people are already burning perimeters around their land, creating fire breaks that they can control. Several nights ago the hill behind our house glowed orange all night. Right now I can see several columns of smoke on the horizon with funnels of birds flying above them.
Last week our askari started burning the grass around our compound. It was amazing how fast it spread. Within seconds from the time he touched the fire to the grass the flames had run the width of our fence with a sound like a hundred little kids stomping on bubble wrap. Slender pieces of black ash wafted into our yard and gathered on top of our tent like a light dusting of black snow. It all made me incredibly nervous, but he was watching the direction of the wind and slashed any flames that strayed too far. Minutes later it died out almost as quickly as it had started.
When the rains were here, they brought incredible coolness but they also flooded roads so that it was hard to move around anywhere. The coming dryness brings the threat of fires but the market is now full of goods brought down from Northern towns. Watermelons have been replaced with custard fruits. Bees are pushing out the mosquitoes. We are slipping out of one season and into another. Even though we have been here four months, everything is still very new to me and I hate to think of the nuances of life I may be missing because of that. I'm gulping it all down now; I can't wait to just sip it. I can't wait until the time next year when I will more fully enjoy what I am feeling now because I know it will soon be gone; or, when I will wait expectantly for something that is coming soon because I know this can't last forever.
I can't wait to think, "Oh yes, I remember this."