Airing up the laundry

Laundry began with grabbing a couple buckets and heading down the road for water. Luckily his mother was adding a few more bricks of coal to the stove in the kitchen so he wouldn’t have to retrieve those too. He carried the electric agitator (about as generous a name as he was willing to give their washing machine) into the house and set it in the kitchen. It would be a lot warmer in here than the outdoor kitchen, standing in the winter air.

            The electric agitator needed to be babysat – he stood next to it, reaching in the quickly greying water to give the spinner a nudge of encouragement every now and then. The bucket of rinse water on the floor was waiting for its first load, the shirts. Then it would be sheets, pants, underwear and finally socks. Good thing those were grey and black to begin with – the water in the agitator wouldn’t be changed. At least he had control over the rinse water, he thought, making one of his numerous trips to dump it over the manure in the cow pen. It wasn’t a lot of fun sliding on a pair of cotton underwear that could stand up on their own.

            The underwear however hadn’t been as stiff as the laundry he ran into today, and he meant that quite literally: he bumped his head on laundry, a string of words he never thought would be matched together until that moment, ducking beneath the line, heading towards the outhouse near the field, from where the horse would soon come and make a line right through his freshly hanging sheets – sheets by bareback, a trick he wasn’t too keen to see turned again.

The bachelor

He’d had enough offers to be married a dozen times over already. His host parents had arranged a double bed in his room so that his future wife could move in with them. It would just take a couple of speakers, some kalens, and a few sheep.

“When are you getting married?” was a common refrain. “It’s a question heard in the states, too,” he thought, “but it’s asked of couples that are engaged.” The question here always came after he stated he was single. The thing about this place was that men picked a day first and a wife second.

His foot tapped lightly on the ground as a fellow staff member at the school continued their conversation:

“Are you married?”

“No, I’m single. No girlfriend either.”

“When are you getting married?”

“Good question. Who knows?”
            “Would you marry a Kyrgyz woman?”

“If we both spoke the same language and both loved Jesus, I suppose.”

Dials number on phone, lets it ring once and hands it to him – “It’s my daughter. She’s studying English in Bishkek.”

“Ohhh, great, thank y—Hello! This is Luther.”

Twenty-five year toilet

He peered down into the blackness. The gaping grave shaped hole tugged at the rocks bulging from its sides, the bottom obscured by the angle of the evening sun. It hadn’t felt like they had accomplished much today having chipped slowly at the earth pressed beneath layers of time. They pulled out two-handed stones, smoothed by the water that used to run through this village, an eon ago. A hole reaching this depth required a rickety ladder and some courage to climb down.

His dad said the hole would take twenty-five years to fill. “Or fifteen,” he thought to himself, “on a diet of oil-steamed potatoes.” The old toilet stood adjacent – a distance that called for a courtesy cough and a turned back through the breaks in the piecework wood, not quite shading indecency.

He wondered what the next “white house” would be made of – or maybe they would just lift the old house from its teetering perch and shuffle a few steps. He made up his mind right then to be on the pulling side of that operation. He thought of the volunteer yet unborn that may one day have the privilege of gracing this “hollowed ground” with his bum.

Beeline

Slip-nosed and ruddy, turned up to the tall horizon, sauntering in unzipped jacket, faster than the cows, and smooth, smooth as a beeline which meant not smooth at all, drifting from one blossoming patch to another, groups in their pink and purple scarves, poofs on top of knitted hats, not hand-knitted but the kitai kind.

Winter, of the moving kind

The clouds rolled in, slowly from the east to winter in the mountains beyond Kizzle-Dobo. Their low, rambling path left traces of cloud in the rocks along the foothills, like cotton candy caught on the jagged rocks and pulled slowly away from the billow that dragged along. The heat of the day melted the wisps into streams of snow, and they rested in the low points between boulders and the cliff’s edge. The snow would be gone within the week, sublimating to join the winter air and the mountaintops above.

Shym jok bala

“The kid doesn’t like pants. I don’t blame him, but I also don’t want him jumping on my bed.” He wondered how he could gently translate this into Kyrgyz. It would be good language practice. He would also prevent the contamination of his bed sheets. “BAS!” His two year-old brother clutching to a pen and two of his fingers squeezed and let the full weight of his body pull him back and towards the playroom. He drew pictures of horses and donkeys and camels and mice and wolves and people – and they all looked the same, with a body, two eyes and some legs – which, he had to concede; they all did have in common. The pantsless boy drew them on a magna-doodle, laughing at each one before a quick swipe drained their print from the magic screen.