These Days...

It seems repetitive and perhaps a little pointless to continue mentioning how hot it has been here lately but somehow it makes me feel a little better.

It has been so hot here lately.

Though to be fair some of that is just me. When the winds pick up at three a.m. Bryan is finally pulling the sheet over his shoulders while I am soaking my kanga in the bucket of water by my bed and plastering it carefully over the now-generous swells of my naked body, willing myself to fall back asleep before the inverter runs out of power and the fan dies a painfully quiet death in front of me. It is hot, but someone I am already growing to love is making it even hotter for me.

Even so, life is far more manageable than I expected it to be at this point. I have taken up making yogurt these days, and the cold creaminess with a little honey makes for a delicious pick-me-up in the afternoons. Meat has been oddly hard to come by in the market lately, but green peppers, carrots and jir-jir (some mysterious green leaf that is wonderful) have been surprisingly abundant and so fresh cool salads have become a delightful new feature in my life too. Afternoons feel suffocating with their sluggish weight, but by sunset, the world has settled into a quiet sigh of relief and feels wide and open again. I have taken to carrying a chair outside to the part of our yard where the ground slopes and I can see far over the bamboo fence to the very distant horizon where a purple mountain sticks its head up in perpetual curiosity. The sun sets there every night, looking almost like an inflamed moon, swollen and faintly flushed in the dusty sky. It never fails to amaze me that an atmosphere full of wind-blown grime makes such a stunning canvas at sunset. The most depressing browns and greys flair into brilliance as day draws to a close. The same dirt that fills my nose and sheets with grit fills the sky with a shock of life for breathless moments every evening. And in those moments it feels like a fair tradeoff.

Eventually the sun impales itself on my bamboo fence and slips under the earth. I go back to finishing dinner but do so feeling revived. These days seven in the evening is my favorite time of day.