Days are long now, the way they were when I arrived in Mongolia a year ago. The sun rises early and challenges me to stay in bed. For a few hours I struggle to stay asleep in the red room behind my eyelids. Days are long and not much to do with them. I stand on my balcony next to the remains of my woodpile. Enough wood there to remind me of the lingering cold that left snow on the mountains just a few nights ago and the cold that will sneak back in just a few months.
A year ago, I’d look down from the balcony and everything that happened below me in the courtyard was a puzzle. Now I count on the daily arrival of the donkeycart trash man and the nonsense he shouts through his bullhorn. The women in their summer house clothes – the rubber slippers, sweatpants pulled up high on their stomachs, and wornout tank tops – trailing out the apartment entrances with buckets of toilet paper and plastic bags full of potato peels and candy wrappers. Every morning the milkladies squatting on their heels next to dented metal containers and shouting their cadence up into the windows, “Soo avaarai, soo avaarai, soo avaarai.” Buy milk, buy milk, buy milk. A few of the same women join them and buy their milk by the liter, filling their own metal containers or empty beer and pop bottles
Last week, hanging out at my place with L, she sat up and asked me if I smelled burning hair. I did, and she ran around my house checking my outlets, my electric stovetop, and ended up on the balcony. Below, a man hunched over the severed head of a goat, blow torching it for the thin strips of meat that lay beneath the scorched skin. This was enough to look at for a moment, curse the smell, and return to what we were doing.
That’s what I do now. Notice the strange and return to what I was doing. Notice the drunk passed out in the middle of the market, keep walking to school. Notice a dead wolf strapped to the hood of a truck, go buy my vegetables. Notice a group of donkeys trotting down main street, back to Walt Whitman. Third flat tire in an hour, return to my patch of singed grass. I’m not surprised anymore, because when you’re at home, very little surprising happens.
It’s taken a while, but I’m home here. This dumpy Soviet apartment of the chipped paint and right angles. The condiments piled on the window sill. The underwear drying on the radiator. The hissing, leaky toilet and the furious bees trapped between the doubled window panes.