I Laugh With Them

I’ve just done our laundry in a bucket and hung it up to dry on chairs placed strategically out in the sun. These days are luminous. There is no wisp of cloud. The mountains rise up out of the horizon like great, snow-covered beasts. Although the shade is very cold throughout the day, the sun is unbelievably hot. For the first time in my life, I feel like I understand the pure heat of our star, piercing the frigid atmospheres of outer space, traveling millions of miles to warm my fair skin. To remain at a comfortable temperature during the day requires a delicate balance of clothing layers. Of course, in the evening, we simply wear everything we have, for when the sun goes down, it is magnificently cold and clear. The milky way is a smudge across the sky.

Yesterday I walked down from our hilltop retreat. Down, down, endlessly down to the river far below us. There is an old Shiva temple in a village down there- crooked and leaning. The gods carved into stone long since worn down to vague outlines – elephant trunk, dancing limbs, fire. The river was a little slice of pristine wild. One could almost imagine one was hiking far into the Cascades or Sierra Nevada, preparing to set up camp by a remote mountain stream. And then the man comes by with his three ponies, carrying bags of rice to the village down the way. And a troupe of women in brightly colored saris pass by with bags of gravel on their heads, laughing.

They seem to be building a road to the temple, and these women are the hardy labor force. They try to speak to me and laugh again at my incomprehension. I think they ask me where I came from, so I name the village up the hill. They seem to be inviting me back to the village to eat with them, but I can’t be sure, and I have a long, long path back up the hillside. So I laugh with them: at myself; at the absurdity and beauty of languages, and cultures, and all the things that keep us from understanding one another.

Last weekend we had a magnificent Thanksgiving feast with the students and Ashish and Deepa and family. We spent all day in the kitchen making chicken and mashed potatoes and greens and pumpkin pie and coleslaw. It was nice just to get a chance to cook again. I went to sleep feeling thankful that my hands smelled like garlic (I remember when I was living in the co-op Synergy in college and Jordan woke me up one morning freaked out that his hands smelled weird. He wondered if there was some lingering poison from the darkroom infecting him. I told him it was just the garlic he had chopped last night on the cooking crew.).

The evening lacked nothing for being a half a world away from its traditional context. In fact, I think it felt richer for being realigned with our present reality. The students were all joking that we were celebrating Thanksgiving with real Indians.