Friday, 09 October 2009 08:08
It's been awhile since I've checked in. I appreciate your e-mails of concern, but nothing's wrong. We've had some major demands at language school, and we're taking some time to get used to homeschooling now that [almost] all of our books and materials have arrived. All that means I've been checking my e-mail about once every 3 days, but only so I can delete the notices congratulating me on winning the British lottery, or offering me big bucks to help Nigerian millionaires transfer their money to my secure American bank account. Otherwise, I put a star next to your notes and promise myself I'll definitely, absolutely answer them before I got to bed...and then promptly forget that I even own such a thing as a computer. Plus, sometimes we introverts just need to hide from the world for awhile. If you haven't heard back from me, that's why. Anyway, let me try to give you some news worth reading about.
I'll start with a vegetable tragedy. As you know, in the spring, any northeastern American's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of rhubarb. Here in Krasnodar, the climate is too warm to grow this vegetable, (or is it a fruit?) which apparently, like the blueberry, needs to lie dormant through long, cold winters in order to thrive. I could have sworn our winters here were both long and cold, but the weatherman says not. So. No rhubarb. You can find it at the everything-imported, price-club-type store in town that offers not only rhubarb in season but also pecans ($18 per pound), taco shells (sometimes), off-brand peanut butter ($8 per jar) and a whole host of other Americanisms, if you have the money and the inclination, neither of which applies to me.
So imagine my joy last spring, when I discovered rhubarb seeds in the garden section of the grocery store! There it was on the front of the seed packet: a full-color photograph of rhubarb. I looked up the Russian word, reven', in the dictionary to be sure. Yep, rhubarb. I showed the packet to the neighbors' Armenian gardener, who'd never heard of it, and he knows everything about plants, so I figured I definitely had the seeds of a plant not indigenous to southern Russia. Everything checked out. I planted the seeds in little yogurt cups on my kitchen windowsill and tenderly cared for them throughout the spring. When it was warm enough, I transplanted them. They grew like...well, like rhubarb. They got huge. The stalks weren't exactly rhubarb-colored, and the leaves were not what I was used to, but that--I reasoned--was because it was Russian rhubarb, not American. I didn't cut any, because the omniscient Internet warned me not to expect fruit the first year, but I did dig one plant up and give it to an American friend as a housewarming gift when she moved. Joy shared is joy doubled, and together we were counting the months until next summer’s harvest of happiness.
I warned you at the beginning that this story doesn’t have a happy ending, so you may want to just stop reading right now, because here’s where it all starts to go downhill.
Still reading? All right then: Last week I was at a party at the home of the Americans to whom I had given a plant, and there it was, thriving in all its huge, rhubarb-y glory in the front of the garden, and I proudly pointed it out to a Russian and began to talk about how much we all love rhubarb but now we don’t have to miss it, because we actually can grow it from seeds here!
She looked puzzled. “That’s not rhubarb,” she said. “That’s beets.”
I explained about the seed packet and the reven', and the gardener, and besides, the plant was way huger than any beet plant has a right to be…
“No,” she insisted, “it’s beets.”
“Look,” I told her (patiently, because after all how could she know: they don’t grow rhubarb in Krasnodar, right?) “it’s totally different from beets.” And to prove it, I broke off a stalk and put it in my mouth and of course…beets.
All I could think, as I stared at the ashes of my rhubarb-colored dreams was, but the package said… Which leads me to two conclusions: One, things are not always what they purport to be and two, I cannot even imagine how huge the beet is going to turn out to be that is growing under all that rhubarb-sized foliage.
Really, what it brought me back to is that we are always learning and relearning how to hold things lightly here. It’s not just a lesson for people living abroad in developing countries; it’s okay to want good things in life; you just have to be able to let them go if they turn out to be beets instead of rhubarb—which so many of them do, in the end. And if you’ve held them lightly, not put too much hope in the comfort they’ll bring you then it’s that much less painful when they fail to come through for you.
In other news (for those who may be rolling their eyes at the inconsequential nature of my rhubarb parable), this month I will begin teaching English classes 3 times a week: on Fridays to disadvantaged children; on Tuesdays to the general public as an outreach of our church, and on Saturdays to my neighbors Nina and Galya, who have been begging for formal lessons since I moved here. Also, next weekend, the 17th, I have been invited to speak to a group of public school teachers on any subject I want! How this came about is a long story and not nearly as interesting as the rhubarb one, so I’ll skip it, but please understand that this is a nearly miraculous opportunity, as foreigners are not generally allowed into schools here, unless their children are enrolled.
Meanwhile, our friend and former teammate Tim W.--remember, he and Joy moved to Germany last summer--stayed with us for 2 weeks while he taught a series of seminars here in Krasnodar. My own Tim left this morning for a hiking trip in the mountains with 4 other men, so the kids and I are on our own for the weekend. And now I’m away to educate my children, so they won’t grow up to be stereotypes of bad homeschooling.
It’s nice to be back in touch with the world!
