It’s not the flocked wallpaper or the massive cream and gold Persian rug on the floor nor the drapes embroidered with crystals beneath the chandelier.  It’s not the red velveteen toshaks with their matching pillows.  It’s not the eighth floor of the new building still under construction.  It’s not the ten liter water bottles Ebrahim carries from Macro or the uchuch for 3000 som to the INCETTI.  It’s not the shop windows of manikins in blue and pink floor-length hijab next to those in skinny jeans and tunics.  It’s not the taxi pit with the guys yelling Asaka! Baluchi! Jalaquduq!  It’s not the smell of petrol or of shashlik grilling on skewers in front of Mosaffa or of samosas frying in a vat of oil on Amir Segur.  It’s not the great statue of Babur mounted on his horse in front of the Andijan train station nor even because the speeding taxis down the double wide street blink their headlights so you can cross.   It’s because the students in a class you walk into stand up to greet you. Because in the registration office, the beautiful girl with an indigo band beneath her white scarf, eyes lined in black, takes your US passport–the first she’s ever held–in shaking hands. Because walking down the street, a boy in a black jeans jacket and running shoes asks what’s your name?” and says he’s never spoken to a foreigner before.  Because when you get into a taxi, the driver greets you Asallahmalecum and because the old man in his square black dopi sitting in the backseat smiles at you with a hand over his heart, Because Eshnut in his great fur hat greets you at the gate with a grin, hosht kellisiz.  Because on the way back from your teacher observation in Quergonteppa, Olim stops for the Valley’s famous lemons and because Shokizjon invites you to his family’s home to make sumulak for Navruz. Because Tamila takes a damas all the way from Asaka to meet you at Mr. Arabic for lesson planning and because Saodat runs to get a key made for your red-carpeted office where an American flag and an Uzbek flag in gold plastic holders stand paired at the front of the massive desk.  It’s because the girl who cleans it wishes you good health, a long life, and much success in rhyming Uzbek, smiling with her grill of gold, offering you a round loaf of naan speckled with sesame seeds. It’s because when your husband Ebrahim goes out into the street, everyone he meets calls him Brother.

On our first trip beyond Andijan viloyati, we travel to Khiva. The tiled minarets in turquoise Majorca rise into azure sky.  Vendors display plastic keychains, bird whistles and polyester scarves from China on plywood tables.  Madam! Come look, only look!

On the flagstones of the empty plaza are spread dozens of embroidered bedcovers of pomegranates, curved peppers, suns and moons.

Why so many? I ask.  A young woman on a wooden chair says, Two years. Covid. No tourists. We are just sewing. This one my sister made; this one my mother.

I kneel on the stones.  Her sister, the one who can’t speak, rushes to me, vocalizing, signing.

The young woman says her sister goes to a school for deaf students.  She sees, then makes the pattern, she tells me.

Her sister brings armfuls, like laundry, so many colors, so much work.  I want all of them, fan through the embroidered pillowcases.

The girl who can’t speak mimes ATM machine, pulls at me, grunting.   She runs ahead of me through the back streets, past the chaihana, the white pompom on her wool hat bobbing.

I am breathless, laughing. At the ATM, I insert a Visa card, withdraw the maximum.  A million som in 100,000 notes.  Then again, another million.  The third time, a million more.

The girl leans against me while the stacks of som shuffle from the machine. I stuff them like leaves into my crossbody bag.

We go back almost running, arm-in-arm.

The young woman folds three embroidered spreads, pushes twelve pillow covers I love into a plastic trash bag.   I give her the stacks. Three million, more than a month’s salary.   Her sister folds two more pillow cases into the bag.  They are her gift, the woman says.

Back in our tiny guest house, I spread the orange pomegranates woven with mint green on my single bed.  I’m ecstatic.

I research suzani on my iPhone, learn that the intricately embroidered covers are made for a girl’s dowry.  From the time she is small, her mothers, sisters, aunts sew sections, then stitch them together in a gorgeous pattern.

The hook-stitched ones are for tourists.

I paid too much, I tell Ebrahim.

You enjoyed buying them, didn’t you? my husband says. Don’t act stupid. Money has to move.

The next morning, from the west gate, our young guide Anush takes us on a tour through the gorgeous architecture of the 2500 years old ruins, the khanate of late fifteenth century Khiva, the treachery, tells us the central story of the Silk Roads.

We visit the khan’s summer palace, the madresa now a tourist hotel, walk between the hand-carved pillars of the mosque where once five thousand worshippers prayed.

I grew up here, Anuysh says. Sher says she ran across those flagstones on the plaza.  She knows every vendor, takes us to buy, to  ter uncle’s woodcarving shop, her cousin’s place of silk scarves, her friend with the embroidered pillow cases.

I already bought covers I say.  You know, the girl who can’t speak?  I bought hers; she was so distressed.

Xaren?  I went to school with her, Anush says.  She has four sisters and another one can’t speak, either, she says, with scorn.   You know why?

Her parents are too close relatives.

I liked her suzani so much, I say.

Anush laughs, harsh.  Not her suzani.  That girl doesn’t bother herself to sew.

Late afternoon, after writing, the sun gentle, I drive twenty minutes down an empty winding blacktop, along groves of uncleared land, past palm trees, and white picket-fenced macadamia farms, past Riley’s Dikene—his wooden table with boulder-sized unripe avocados, yellow lemons, oranges, limes and coffee-roasted from the land where a little goat grazes inside an enclosed pasture.  As at most of the roadside stops in this southern end of the island, no one mans the stand: chalked prices; tin canister with money slit; honor system.

Down to Kau Lia to turn right one lane curving at 25 mph through the little town of Na’alehu–a place reminding me of Hemingway’s Key West before that time passed—by the elementary school playground and the local police station.  After the yellow caution cow sign, pastures on the left and up to the overlook of a stunning bay: abandoned pier; white ruffles of sea foaming against a black beaded necklace of lava enclosing tidal pools: soft malachite hills on the distant flanks of Mauna Loa. A car has usually stopped there, tourists on the loop road holding a cellphone aloft to snatch the astonishing view.

At the bottom of the curve, a sharp right enters the palm-lined drive to the pockmarked asphalt lot of Whittington Beach Park. In my water shoes, a towel over a shoulder, my rental car key pinned inside my swimsuit top, I walk across the green turf by an immensely exuberant monkey tree to the piles of lava rocks that form the northern edges of a tidal lagoon, waves crashing outside the rock enclosure on the southside.

Near high tide, this is a natural Olympic pool, both protected and scary:  water in murky light, darting things, unsuspected twigs, seaweed rising in dragon kale arcs, sharp knee-scraping boulders, warm and shivery cold currents against my skin.

Through my swimming goggles, yellow and black angelfish, a neon blue minnow, school of soft striped greys. An extraordinary Hawai’ian green turtle flying underwater, flipperwings, dragging paddle feet like I do behind my stroking upper body.  Entranced, I follow her meandering path forgetting to mark the dark shoreline.  A wave knocks me into a sharp lava ridge.  I’d missed the edge that forms the outer ring of the pool.  I’d gone beyond bounds, into the open surf crashing sea.  Panic. Clinging to boulders, I climb up the black rocks, then scramble across back to the protected lagoon.

Swimming in a tidal pool is a metaphor for working in digital space.  There on the surface, my audio track, a narrative tide.  Just beneath, in the video track, still and moving images accompanied by the currents of a shifting music track.  Words, images, transitions choreograph insights in my storytimeline.  Sometimes quite unexpectedly, I go out of bounds–a synaptic juxtaposition of memory beyond linear narrative– then climb back, to the story’s meaning and theme.

In this piece, the  narrative tide moves from geological time to the present then shifts to forty years in the past to  explore the theme of uncertainty.  Click the link to view the 3-minute piece   slag 2021 

Sayaka is visiting Santa Fe from Tokyo, having come to see me– her ESL teacher–eight years after the year she attended a Newcomer Program at my former high school.  In my fourteen years of teaching in public school, she is the first graduate to return, to seek my counsel as she prepares for a career as a native Japanese-speaking English teacher in the Japanese school system—her accomplishment through a rigorous preparation program with tests and interviews.

After the museum, at The Shed, we drink margaritas and talk about “wait time” in the context of emerging English learners. At the open air Palace of the Governors, we look at the wares on the blankets of the artists spread beneath the timbers. Sayaka chooses a delicate string of turquoise and seed pearls, symbolic of her Western and Asian selves: bilingual with fluent idiomatic English, bicultural American high school graduate and soon-to-become formal Japanese teacher.  We talk about identity:  the American self she developed through two years at Boulder High as captain of the swim team and her native Japanese self. She want to speak only English and identifies American. We are sitting on cushions on the floor in front of a fire in the kiva. I listen to the crack of scrap wood and observe this beautiful young Asian woman. What would happen, I ask, if she couldn’t speak Japanese? I mean, ever again. She waits, quiet, reflecting, then shares about not being able to talk with the grandfather she visits monthly in his small village.  He doesn’t know her American self, she says:  she becomes Japanese with him. And she speaks of the nuances in one Japanese concept that English only approximates: 待つ.

That evening, Ebrahim cooks planked salmon and basmati rice and we eat with chopsticks on the floor in front of the dying fire and, after, play Scrabble.  Sayaka is excited, delighted to spend a Friday evening playing Scrabble with her sixty-plus former teacher.  Unfamiliar words–jilted and queue– appear in the crossword. No matter how elevated my vocabulary, Ebrahim wins with a two letter. Oh. Sayaka asks him to take her to Target the next day to buy the game to take home to play with her parents, to teach to her students.

On her last evening, we drive in the dark to a pueblo for the Fire Dance. Firelighters with tanks of gasoline start bonfires of a dozen paired cairns like gates along a curved trajectory of the open field of mud. They flame up bright and hot. The paired fires burn, flaring with the bittersweet smell of pinion. We wait for the dancers.  The fire gates burn down to warming flames.  The Indian Officer stands by one of the fires:  he tells us to stay warm and invites us to stand around another. We wait for the dancers.  We think the men are in the kiva preparing for the dance: smoke coming from the chimney;  a door opening—light within–door closing.   The fires burn down.  Sayaka gazes down at the whitened logs on a hotbed of coals.  We wait for the dancers.  Ebrahim and I know this is how the experience goes:  we’ve asked before, “what time are the dances?”  “Later,” a passing pueblo resident says.  The warmth of the collapsing embers rise like a caress, pinion smoke acrid, the dark sky above so many pricks of starlight, the quiet pueblo adobe buildings framing the paired piles of crimson, our community of three: my husband, this beautiful young woman; me. 

When the fire gates burn to the ground, an older Puebloan comes to rake the coals into small piles.  As we step aside, I ask quietly, politely, are there going to be dances?  Yes, he says, over there. He points to the far side of the pueblo, across a sea of mud away from where we and other Anglo visitors are standing, waiting. He tells us some men will come out to light the fires and when we see that, we should go up there.  He says the dancers will come out and then they will go back in and that’s it.  He carries his rake to the next pile, scooping embers. I laugh out loud. Then get quiet in the burning. We three stare into the heat.

A few women wrapped in colorful blankets appear out of the adobe houses, stepping gingerly in white ankle moccasins across the muddy ground.   I think this is a sign the dancers are coming. We cross the space, squishing through mud, and stand behind the women in a large semicircle.  Firelighters come out of a far building with gas cans and light dozens of six foot high cairns stacked in a grand circle with pinion logs. The cairns blaze higher than our heads.  Anticipation tastes metallic.  Then the  kiva door opens, a man in leather and cloth emerges with boughs of evergreen, leading others in totemic dress. The Buffalo passes and women throw blessings. The antelope dances–in white leather with poles in their hands– step out, one foreleg then the other. Little deer dance, running behind, tufts of tail flit on the rear of their baggy brown sleepers. The dancers walk in a serpentine pattern around the central building, towards and away from us observers—native and tourist–standing respectfully, watching.   The dancers pass, to and fro, back and forth around the circle, then reenter the kiva—chief, shaman, buffalo, antelope disappear.  The firelight brightens our faces—Native, Asian, Middle Eastern, Anglo. Then, the Pueblo women turn away.  We follow them through the dark back to the parking lot under a zillion sparks, star embers in an infinite sky.

My surgery is scheduled in a week.  I look towards my operation with hope though I won’t know until after if the surgery will have been successful.  Not until Dr. Hogan slices open the same incision he stitched shut with the explant will he find if the six weeks of vancomycin has killed the infection.  

I hope for a different future from my recent past:  I hope to rove around the world under my own volition.

In Canyon de Chelly in Arizona this summer, we camped in the Monument in a charmed circle of massive cottonwoods, twelve druidic totems I embraced around midnight when I crawled out of the tent for a tinkle.  Each trunk a monument to longevity, dwarfing my own human decades.  They felt like rock, no sense of sap when I pressed my cheek against the petrified riffled bark.  

In the morning, the cacophony of birds woke us.  Boo climbed out to heat water in the JetBoy and made plunger coffee in the camping press.  Nothing like fresh brewed French Roast under the comforter and quilt inside one’s own screened in temporary home.  

We packed up and then hiked down the White House trail. Flawless turquoise skies above the undulating rocks and the massive curve of the red stonewalls, oranges, striations of white, yellow and pink, smell of dust and odor of dry.  A few skinny lizards; tupelo chirping from branches; pink trumpets of cactus in bloom. 

Tucked into the crevice of ledges the unmistakable ruins of the Anasazi. Six hundred feet below the rim on the canyon floor,  a green gemland of grass and blooming trees, the lovely ruins crumbling back into the land. 

Climbing out, the rise of sheer walls from the canyon floor, magnificence in their vertical striations, dripping with black like a bottleful of ink poured down the face.

My body wanted to hike, the muscle memory engaged from half a century of trails but my hip demanded my patience.  Each plant of my extension pole invited the shoulder,  quads, the glutes to take the burden, cajoling the flexor, asking for another step.  I counted 100 and then another ten decades as in prayer. I wanted to give in: my groin asked for respite each step. But climbed the entire way back out in pain, though not in grief.  That came after. The inconsolable ache of my loss

Images from White Sands National Park and Keshava Temple in Karnataka illustrate a rumi poem to celebrate the gift of recovery.     Click here to view the digital poem   rove 2020

By the time of my Sunday brunch–spanikopita, tabouli, spring asparagus and new potatoes; dolmas and olives–the trees were greener than floral white.  No matter. The sun was bright and the enamel pots on the deck overflowed with blooming pink petunias.  I concocted lemon/vanilla vodka/pink champagne cocktails and there was room at the table Boo built and on the tahkt for the intergenerational eight who showed up- four over sixty friends and four twenty-somethings.    The afternoon unfolded the way holidays do–shared food and conversation, ever-evolving friendships.

The next day, my actual birthday, Ebrahim and I drove the hour to Ojo Caliente where I  soaked up the minerals in eleven hot pools and turned 64 circles in the one cold pool, an essential memory from each year of my life. The early ones: Easter Sunday straw hats with grosgrain ribbon; after church egg hunts.  I was pulled back to my Ohio childhood.

In shush, a text about two sisters one Ohio summer are juxtaposed with nature photographs of Rock Creek Park in Washington D.C taken by my dear friend C.N.  

This afternoon, I’ll uncover the two-person tahkt Ebrahim made from two recycled single beds, put a Turkish kilim on the wooden platform and pile it with embroidered pillows I brought back from India.  I’m finding choices for a haft-seen table: sekkeh (gold coins);  sabzeh (grass); serkeh (vinegar);    senjed (Persian olive); seeb (apple); seer (garlic) and somaq (sumac).  I’ll place these on the half circle ledge above the kiva in tiny riffled-edged turquoise enamel dishes I bought in Esfahan.  

This morning, Ebrahim and I went hiking, thought it was quite an effort for me to climb a short two miles—the hip still unable to support me and painful with each step–but it was lovely walking in the low mountains outside of Santa Fe, with snow-encircled cactus and New Mexico sky so blue I want to dive into it.   Walking and thinking about the trip we’re planning to Iran in September and remembering the time we traveled to the north…

Ebrahim, his brother Mehdi and I check into a modern whitewashed hotel on the edge of an artificial lake in the North of Iran.  Sweltering from the long drive, I climb out of the back seat, my tunic dress and long-sleeved white tee a clinging cotton second skin.  In the lobby of the Espinas Astara Hotel, a pianist plays pop Persian music at a baby grand in the corner of the modern open space dominated by a massive bronze-like frieze of a winged lion, symbol of ancient Persia.  Gilims of traditional design–bold geometrics in blacks, reds, browns, and whites–hang on the white walls. In a circular glass case in the center of the room flags are displayed for every country in the world–the red, white and blue is there, too–a most international welcome.    A modest gold-on-black enamel of the Imam offers a seemingly benign gaze from a central pillar. Two Arabs in white dishdashas and keffiyehs sit talking on leather couches. A female newscaster in a silk headscarf and elegant makeup broadcasts the news with accented English from a TV mounted on a wall.  The modernity and international flavor comforts me.

 After we check in, I take two chairs from our third-floor room onto the cement balcony outside, on a ledge so narrow I can sit only diagonally, tilted back on the chair’s two legs, my feet stretched out on the other. A blue sky with puffy cartoon clouds and below a paddleboat concession. My husband and his brother fasten themselves orange life preservers around their chests and climb into a large duck-shaped boat to peddle across the glittering water.   On the far side of the lake, a yellow tractor moves down the road, the distant motor a hum.  Beyond are wet green rice fields, shimmering silver and farter the wooded foothills of the Elburz Mountains. 

I sip strong sweet Turkish coffee.  Quite alone, I feel invisible on my balcony perch and drape my headscarf hejab around my neck.  Warm rays on my shoulders, a long kiss from this most benevolent afternoon.

“We want to see it,” Ebrahim says.  

Danielle drives down Agua Fria through the working class neighborhood on the west side of St. Francis (the opposite end of town to the affluent Eastside of Canyon Road’s fancy art shops and Plaza), past trailer homes and trucks parked in empty lots and chain link fences, mailboxes with numbers spray-painted on. She drives past what I call los manos de maize house with a wall-size mural of black and white open hands offering Indian corn with kernels the size of your head.  Then past an ancient adobe with Our Lady of Guadalupe and her day glow thorns painted miraculously larger than the cracked wall.  Just past the organic doggie treats store and Agua Fria nursery is the house on the left with a hundred ceramic Marias and bald San Franciscos with plastic roses climbing bathtub arches. Next street is Camino De Guadalupita, a dead-ended cul-de-sac.  In a row of nine little stucco townhomes, all adobe-dun colored with shared walls and just enough space in the narrow driveway to squeeze a pickup truck.  Not yet on the market a 945 square-foot dive.  In the puke yellow tiny back bedroom is a single bare mattress on the floor: bras and t-shirts are still draped from wire hangers in the doorless closet.  Carpeting looks like it came out of doghouse.  In the other bedroom a broken candelabra dangles half detached from the ceiling.  In the linoleum-floored kitchen, the refrigerator door is open, mold spouting on the sweating enamel.  It smells like mildew and burnt toast.  Boo looks at me.  He can hardly stand it.  I look at him, wait a beat.  

“I want this,” he says.   “This is exactly what I want. This is perfect. It has everything we are looking for.”  

My shoulders lift towards my ears.  Would that the cracked linoleum outdated kitchen?  The dark green living room and its dark orange-painted kiva, greyed curtains hanging half off the bar? The tiny bathroom and a mottled shower stall?  The blue dry-wall blocking a converted garage from any access?  The vacant lot full of scrub brush across the street?  I straighten my back and we go to our apartment to talk it over.

I listen with my heart for this project my Boo wants to do. Then we call our Broker back and ask to see 512 again.  With me squatting on the fireplace, Ebrahim makes a low offer as is (factoring in the cost of a major remodel).  The seller—Dennie?  Dollie? —probably so happy to get rid of this trashed place without having to fix anything, accepts it the next day. 

After the closing on February 16, 2018, my Demo Guy pulls up the filthy carpet, tears out the rotting linoleum, rips up tile and mortar, crowbars off baseboards and molding, unhinges the doors and, once he gets going, rips out the entire l980’s heavy over-cabineted kitchen.  We call Restore Habitat for Humanity who comes for the moldy fridge, broken dishwasher, and cast iron sinks. We save the two by fours for a building project, all the hardwood doors, and cut the molding into kiva-sized kindling. 

After tearing out the sheetrock in the garage and fixing the door with brackets and an ancient pulley system, Ebrahim repurposes the oak cabinets from the kitchen, refitting them into a corner workshop. He is so into his process of measuring and cutting, I could have been in Mongolia.  One time, I open the door and yell, “I’m your wife!  I’m part of this project too!”  I didn’t think it registered, then, his voice from the garage “Jode!  Come here!”

I hustle like I used to do for Dad when I was a little girl.  “Hold this board”  he commands.  Bossman. I hold the 2×4 with my French gel manicured nails as he rips it with the skill saw.  

I buy a pair of smarty “demopants” at Goodwill for $9.99 and order a l2 foot dumpster.  It’s delivered by a huge semi and squeezed like Noah’s Ark into the length and width of the little driveway.  We half-fill it with refuse which can’t be reclaimed.  I lurch around on my good leg, tossing in the non-recyclables.   Now denuded and swept clean, the tiny house seems huge to us, and her structural walls very sound and thick.

 We celebrate with an invite.  I buy champagne and unpack my most beautiful flutes to toast the concrete floors and empty rooms.   Meredith brings salt and bread.   She has a house in Santa Fe and my forty years friendship with her from my college years is the energetic magnet for me landing here. My broker team-member Brett comes in and we pop the champagne.  From across the street comes Teena, transplanted from Boulder, too, who teaches cranial sacral therapy at the Santa Fe School of Massage not far away at the end of Aqua Fria.  I see she may help me heal from the Mongolian trauma that still grips me.  Two bottles in, Teri and Andy arrive, bringing Lebanese falafel, hummus and tabouli.  We set up a board on two upended drawers left from the kitchen, share food and toast to our find.

We’ve landed in a neighborhood where I feel I belong, as in a Dakar quartier or Thaba’Nchu township or Bangalore hobli.   It’s raw, inspiring both of us with this project of transformation, documented in the blog post gut posted on 6/27/2018.

We gave notice at Los Pinones and, on the apt date of April Fool’s, we’ll move into 512 Camino de Guadalupita, Santa Fe, NM, 87505.

But instead I slowly, stiffly leverage myself out of bed without disturbing Boo, limp down the hallway, and now sit at the kitchen table on a rolling desk chair cushioned with a big fat bedpillow and a heating pad at my back wrapped in my soft cozy robe like some ancient Mrs. Cravitts scowling about her aches and pains.  There is a fluorescent light above. I don’t bother with a candle, crystals, or the rituals I used to follow.   I’ve made a mug of Morning Thunder–my pre-coffee caffeinated tea with almond milk and Turbino sugar–and I journal on the scarred wooden top of the table we bought at Goodwill for ten bucks.  It’s chilly and I’m occupying an energetic circle of pain:  its tough to sit very long because I stiffen up.  There’s little pleasure in my chair pose at this MacBook keyboard– a position I used to love!  This past summer back in Chapel Hill, every morning after Ebrahim went off to the Ratman job, I would drive or bike the l0 minutes to swim at the UNC Recreation Center and then put on low-heeled booties with ankle socks and a shortie dress like someone half my age. At Mercury Coffee and Ice Cream shop, I’d get a two-dollar coffee and sit at a high table on a stool for hours–writing, drafting, creating my course (the design business of training) tucked away from the cacophony of the other clientele with my Beats on until the aircon behind the gelato cabinet goosebumped even my knees. 

At Los Pinones we rent a chalkgray and white cheaply-renovated apartment and we are just two among a non-community of other apartment dwellers–the Latina mom, her ten year old daughter and their yapper dog down one flight; the older single man up one; directly above us that stomper single mom and her profanity-spouting kids.  We haven’t even unpacked.  Persian rugs are rolled up in the open furnitureless living room. My vintage black Harley stands in the middle, a hopeful symbol to a future orientation. A small bedroom has a knock-together Ikea sewing table and Target stackable storage cubes. 

The great pleasure of this flat is the second bedroom with my bed, the one piece of furniture that made the cut during the exodus from Willow Green.  With white high-count Egyptian cotton sheets and a down duvet and three Euro pillows deep, I spend a great deal of time there, propped up reading (after Nine Parts of Desire and In Search of Islamic Feminism, now rereading The Iranians) or writing on my laptop, snuggling down for nap—a permission of healing I give myself every afternoon, pulling the blinds to half-mast and making a white ceramic mug of ginger tea with honey, burning a Pondicherry stick of incense in a glass cylinder.   I have nightstands! Two off-white matching ones we found at Restore Habitat for Humanity last week.  For the last year in transient spaces,  I’ve tumbled my coffee on the floor in the Kengri Hobli hovel, set it on a stack of books near the sleeping mat in the Chapel Hill tiny house, or balanced it on a two cinder blocks and a board in the flat in Ulaanbaatar.  The proximity of a table with a reading lamp is luxury. 

Ebrahim and I are in search of a place where the bed and nightstands fit. For the past weeks, we’ve look at high-end vanilla beautifully finished two story townhomes in mega complexes, lofts designed with Denver-urban open ductwork, and Homewise new construction out at Osha: all out of our price range and not the fixer-upper we’re in search of.  Stay posted. We know our dream project is waiting out there somewhere.

This digital piece is inspired by that argument upstairs.  Inside my brain other females take up space: the sister who blisters, the princess who gossips, the friend who pretends.  I say to this trio of Harpies: I’m done with your Occupy Mind Movement! Images from my fave photographer, tunes by Issa Bagayoga and a short storyline share digital space in cootie.

December finds me in Seoul, oddly listening to the pumped in musac Sleigh Bells, I’m Dreaming of, and other nostaligic songs while the city has lit itself up with plastic Christmas trees and promotions in every department store.  Outside the plate glass window of my hotel room, the grey and white legos-block buildings turn sparkle plenty towards dusk. In the night, massive building-sized Samsung screens on top of highrises send an eerie TV glow across the city. Below, a relentless stream of grey, white and black cars gridlock the six-lane highways, taillights red blinking through this ersatz imported holiday.

Ulaanbaatar, like Seoul, mirrored the capitalist fervor of seasonal décor.  Street wrapped tree lights, a giant toy Santa train, and the State Department Store glittering with gold and silver ornaments.  A kind of shopping frenzy in the city, though to be fair, the SDS is the warmest place in the coldest capital on the planet. 

I’ve stayed warm in a flat I rented in UB, but this ELSEPC contract turned into a relentless schedule of back to back trainings, heading out by car eight, twelve, or fifteen hour drives to a boxy coal-fueled town in a distant aimag to facilitate 25 or 30 or 40  teachers on learner-centered methodologies and inclusive classroom approaches in a local school.  I disrupted spaces arranged in hierarchical rows, engaged teachers in play, and with more manipulatives than a kindergarten playroom, modeled a transformed classroom.  Post-training mentorship conversations long into the evening, an insomniac night in a bare chilly Soviet-style hotel, and onwards to the next city and another training. 

I traveled under a blanket tucked in the back of an old Lada Vesta for hours through Central, Western and Govi-Altai through undulating snowdraped steppes, knife edge of distant hillside etched in brown and grey against a blue sky striated with white,  empty open landscape bisected by a distant single railroad track and a line of thin electric poles.  Nearer the road, hay grass cropped to a few inches and, in the snowsift, stocky Mongolian ponies foraged. There the permafrost goes so deep it never melts.  Most herders have moved south or settled in their winter camps with stocks of cut grass for fodder.

At a lone outpost town, a motorcycle is parked in front of a liquor store, long leather seat retrofitted with a traditional red woven and embroidered camel saddle cover.  A shepherd in the ankle length belted dahl and fur hat saunters out. He sees tall blonde and grins. I put out my hand. He grabs me around the neck and pulls me in close for a bear hug.  I don’t resist, not surprised by the reek of vodka.  My new BFF.

Returning  from a five-hour turnaround trip to Choir, some distance from the capital, we the we turned east and enter a monument built in the last decade to remind this still emerging democracy of it’s three thousand years nearly obliterated by Soviet revisionist history.  Life-size images of soldiers on horseback gallop across a frozen plain while white gers—summer holiday stays– stud the background. The massive Chengiss statue glints in the sun. Mounted on a massive round wedding cake of a museum, the Man of Steel on his steed casts blinding light. I climbed up to stand, toothpick sized to his massive lance, and sweep my gaze across the open lunar-white landcape.  In the distance, mountain ranges roll onwards, deep blue and white and I enjoy a brief frigid hiatus of contemplation.  Then  the back seat all the way to the lung-stinging coal smoggy, traffic congested, air biting city for a “rest day,” filled up with restless movement:  unpacking, sorting, calculating data, repacking for another provincial trip or a local school training.

At  the tail end of November, four days before my final training in Ulaanbaatar with 30 teachers converging from the provinces I’d visited as well as other far-flung regions for three full days of support in professionalizing their field,  I was finalizing the teacher-driven observation protocols, objectives based backward design, proposal abstracts, Linked In profile rotations    I’d worked my Sunday “rest day” as usual.   In the second bedroom of my large post-Soviet flat, I’d been organizing  scope and sequence on giant wall charts;  lining up materials across the floor;  piling up my highlighters, Scrabble cubes and Pictionary cards; labeling texts I’d shipped from my teachers’ library for ETMs,; color-coding label/folder systems, , handouts and task assignments for purposeful grouping the ETMS.   My method was visual, chronological and comprehensible.

In the kitchen on the counter, dozens of yellow sticky notes and receipts, email addresses, to do notes littered the counter and I started to tackle this disorder.   Outside,  dusk was falling, and  the failing light reminded me it the long frigid dark night would keep me incarcerated.   I had time for a short walk around the neighborhood, maybe pick up a Tiger for a late Sunday night brew.

I laced up my gridded ankle high winter Nikes, threw on an old sweater and a down vest, belted  a military coat, pulled on gloves, wrapped a scarf up to my eyes, and unlocked the double doors to my flat. The cement stairs were 3 floors down, empty and dusty, and the broken wooden door squeaked when I pushed it out.  I picked my way across the back lot where there was less ice.  Elegant urban dark-haired Mongolian girls strolled arm in arm back from the State Department Store, wrapped in knee-length down puffer coats, matching scarves and hats, knee-high boots. Men in heavy wool coats and earflap warmer hats smoked and chatted. A stocky woman in thick-soled high-heeled boots pulled along a toddler swaddled up to her pretty brown eyes in snowsuit and scarf.  Many in my neighborhood  returning from weekend grocery shopping carrying bulging plastic bags.

As oncoming headlights swept around corners, I gingerly picked my way across the cracked asphalt to the curb.  In a sliver of a second, I caught black ice, crashed down like Blue Sky Tower in an earthquake, hip cleaved like a plane of diamond.   Lying on my back on the freezing ground, I moaned.  A couple men came over to put their arms under me. “Can I help you up? We can lift you and sit you here.  Cement bench dusted with snow, parked in front of another  indistinguishable ochre apartment in my neighborhood.   I refused to be moved as people walked by staring.  

I asked someone to call Sara who I’d travelled with for days and uncountable kilometers across her grand country.  Someone handed me a cell phone and I heard her voice saying she’d be there..  Such consolation to know someone in Mongolia was there for me.  The night turned darker and colder, the frigid ground beneath an infinite ice pack, but I wouldn’t get into the ambulance until Sara arrived.  As I knew she would,  Sara came and the  rest of the story follows a somewhat expected international emergency:  Ambulance to local trauma center, xrays, fracture diagnosis, transfer by ambulance to a local hospital (canteen closed, no doc, no food, no meds, long night).  The next morning,  though as an ELSPEC I was not the Embassy’s responsibility, the PAO and Embassy Doctor visited. with strong advice.to consider major surgery outside of Mongolia.  Recommendation: medevac to Seoul where hip replacement surgery met Western standards..   Scheduled to fly that evening with doctor escort, I learned the  Korean Air flight to Seoul was cancelled.   North Korea had tested it’s ballistic missile in airspace.  It would be another night and day before I could fly.

Two days in that hospital bed waiting gave me time to meet with Program Coordinator Alta and  high-flyer English Teacher Mentors I’d trained.  I handed over design notes, collated materials, assigned leadership roles to guide the upcoming 3-day training with 30 mentors.   Capacity building proven as each of the ETMs stepped up to lead a session on observation protocols, workshop objectives and planning, proposal writing and submitting, international Linked-In profiles.  So that’s the story.  I was medivaced to Seoul.  Ebrahim flew in the next day pre-op and stayed with me for at Sung Ae on a leather cot by my hospital bed were I was relegated to complete bed rest on an I.V. for seven days.   Two weeks post hip replacement  under Korean medical care is another story,  but today,  a titanium hip is in place and I’m hoping to be home for Christmas.