apples in the summer are golden sweet

I hear it over and over in my head, day in and day out: standing in a rowdy line for tacos, sitting behind miles of Yosemite traffic, baking below the California sun at work, holding my phone high hoping for even one service bar, trying to fall asleep inside my tent while the neighbors' metal blasts through thin canvas walls. I hear the low, strong voice of an old woman climbing slowly into the back of a roasting hot bush taxi. "Kala suuru!" she barks at the muscular young men demanding she hurry up, adjusting piles of faded fabric draped around skeletal shoulders. "Kala suuru," she states again, easing with a sigh into a minute crevice between people on the jagged bench seat. We roar off, dust billowing in our wake.

"Kala suuru, kala suuru, kala suuru," I chant internally, chewing the tip of my tongue as I feign interest in the complaints of my peers and park guests, most often about "poor food choices" or "the heat."

But a nasty, bitter anger rolls in my stomach before I can stop it. No matter how much I hear it, how much I try to remember, the fact is that my patience wears thin these days.
They say that reverse culture shock is harder, and so I expected to struggle. What I didn't anticipate, probably foolishly, was how lonely it would feel to be back on American soil. I'm so much closer to my support system, to my family, after all.

Now, it is increasingly apparent that I am becoming readjusted to the States. Last week, I successfully grocery shopped without becoming irrationally angry at the peanut butter aisle, for example. But my longing for Niger, the friends I made there, the experiences I simply should be having, never leave my mind. Day in and day out I fight for patience, primarily with myself, and day after day, I fail. I wish I could say that I am better, but I must admit in the interest of honesty that I am still no where near the person I thought I was, and that it brings me to tears with embarrassing regularity. Finding patience in America is a different battle all together than in Niger.

Then again, everything is different all together than in Niger.

In Africa and Europe, which is to say in the past year, I had come to accept patience as something akin to faith. That is, patience at its core requires a person to operate in trust that the future will be different while she is still unable to see how it might be so. Perhaps it is the pace of life here, or because our needs are so fulfilled that our reasons for dissatisfaction are less tangible, but my foreign definition unravels as I attempt to wrap it around this new life.

Most often, my patience falters in my interaction with Americans. While my list of complaints about the culture that spawned me are seemingly endless, the root of my problem can be described in just one terrible word: apathy.

Several weeks ago after a long day of hiking, a couple of friends and I had come together for a pizza dinner. Conversation bounced around in areas of shared interest and knowledge until we came across a subject about which I knew nothing; the two began speaking about a celebrity of one sort or another, who had a book and a television show that I have never seen. Apparently appalled by my ignorance, these friends balked. "You've never heard of [insert name here]!" one barked in a volume that my affronted pride interpreted as shouting. The other jumped in next, equally disgusted that I should be so lame. They both laughed, and I was left feeling tiny and embarrassed. I can only assume this was their, perhaps unrecognized, intention. How dare I be so ignorant! Surely something must be wrong with me to not know [again, insert the name I can no longer recall].

I read an article once in TIME titled "Why We Care" with a large photo of Tiger Woods after his marital scandal stole the news. The author opined that our collective addiction to this celebrity culture was a symptom of the segmentation of our society. Naturally, we crave a subject we might discuss with anyone, a shared knowledge base in our increasingly niche-obsessed culture. We talk about these things because it is easy to do so, because we can assume that most everyone has seen "The Hangover," for example, or that even the woman in front of me in line for tacos will have formed an expressible opinion about Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse. Sure, with our close friends we might delve into deeper conversational waters, but amongst acquaintances and strangers, when grasping for subjects to fill the Fearsome Silence, we land in the shallow, albeit dramatic, lives and works of celebrities. Here, we can share our thoughts free from most worry of offending our company since most of us have little actual investment in these matters.

It seemed a logical argument, and so I've remembered it, but it provided little comfort that evening. As I nursed my bruised ego, I wondered to myself about the endless subjects about which my company knew little, and I couldn't help but to feel a bit arrogantly comforted by my travels and the breadth of my recent experiences. I'm not proud of the reaction, but it nevertheless allowed me to rejoin the conversation with less hesitation.

The same friends who seemed to regard me as small and ignorant that day are just as quick to cut off most statements I make about Africa. No one will be able to relate, I habitually remind myself, kala suuru, and I return to my lonely musings. But the matter stretches far beyond disinterest in the unrelateable, and I'm becoming exhausted with simplifying it thus. It is a matter of apathy. When it comes down to it, most of us care very little about poverty or desertification or malnutrition or illiteracy, blessed as we are to be unbothered by them. Even the exceptionally poor in our country enjoy amenities such as electricity and clean drinking water. While I can "kala suuru" the crap out of long lines and crowded buses and the broken community clothing dryers, I am simply not yet able to have patience with such apathy or the blatant, deep, dangerous ignorance it forgives.

Particularly not when I am made to feel embarrassed for my lack of knowledge in other, less prevalent subjects.

This is not an affliction of the developed world. While in Europe, and certainly while living in Ireland, I rarely needed to include my rehearsed explanation that Niger is "a country in West Africa north of Nigeria" in discussion. Common also was the knowledge that Niger is incredibly poor and suffers annual food shortages. These are things reported by the BBC, after all. Perhaps the geographical education systems in these countries surpass our own. However, it seemed more effective that a belittling similar to what I endured for my unfamiliarity with [aforementioned celebrity] might be applied upon different sorts of ignorance abroad. With so much more international interaction, and thus increased understanding that a world is swirling outside their borders, there exists a sense of responsibility to be informed about said world.

And you will be shamed if you are not.

What's the difference?

In Niger men drink tea. Around the village during the day, I'd come across small collections of men in shade, sitting around a metal basket of glowing charcoal with a tiny green or blue teapot balanced atop. The men came together and spoke, even if their discussions seemed sparse or of little consequence. In Ireland similar groups formed but around pints at the pub. We'd share stories of the day and of the island and mostly just babble nonsense, but we came because, people, we need each other! This social need, the desperation we feel to be part of something, to be recognized and thus valued by individuals outside of our immediate lives, spans continents, and so I've gathered it is part of our nature. But in the States we seem to have lost connection to such social endeavors. In our massive, segmented society, we interact with coworkers, friends and family in safe, private ways, but we often don't have an equivalent setting in which to be with people we don't well know, but yet somehow know.

I've been a regular at coffee shops since I was sixteen. With my best friend in high school, who has now settled in L.A., I'd drive to Louisville on Saturday afternoons to order absurd coffee concoctions and watch the people walk past. We tried many of Louisville's extensive coffee shop locales, but ultimately settled into just one, where it came to be that I no longer needed to specify my regular order. In college, I was often teased for the reliability that I was at the MT Cup after and between classes. There's something so wonderful about being recognized by the other regulars, these people who have no ultimate impact on my life, I guess. To be honest, I'd never much thought of it. But maybe this is what I was seeking: a place where people knew my name, or at least my face. As I've wandered this past year without such a place, I've felt distinctly more lost. We regard privacy so highly here, expect it to such a degree, that we've grown comfortable being anonymous in generic locations. We'd rather people just leave us alone and are bothered when they don't.

We aren't comfortable around each other, and we've forgotten how to listen. We can be apathetic to the plights of individuals beyond our immediate circle because, well, they're easy to ignore. Change the channel or flip the page, click a different link, and you can assure yourself that the life you know is the only one there is. Most people would rather not listen to stories to which they cannot relate or to which they might not know how to react, and well, as my grandma would say, you don't learn much with your mouth open.

Living sans a sense of our place in the larger community, much less the world, allows us to be apathetic. And we're allowing each other, and ourselves, to be ignorant.
A stranger asserted to me last week over my morning coffee that people don't read anymore. "That's why the country is in the state it's in," he declared. "We're not paying attention."

Well, no, we're not. It's impossible to care about the whole world, and it's painful to watch everything that's falling apart. We worry about those things which immediately affect us, and if we manage to manage those things, we feel damn good about it. As we should; we're all not just carrying heavy loads, we're juggling them. We're multitasking our lives away, forgetting how to relax, and never considering the necessity of patience.

So even if we do sit down in the company of people from whom we might learn, we're texting more people, checking our email, listening to music and in general running each other over. Even when we have a chance to listen, it no longer feels like we have a chance to listen. Just a second, let me check my facebook....

It overwhelms me, this pace of things, and I can't remember the last time I sat down for tea. Perhaps Yosemite living is more so this way, desperate as we are in every moment of precious sunlight to be doing all the wonderful things at our disposal that we feel guilty for sitting. But what a shame, surrounded by such majesty, that we should feel obligated to ensure our personal lives are competing. We grow so concerned with our ability to climb the hardest routes, trek the longest trails, prove ourselves the fittest and fastest, that we forget even amongst the mountains and raging waterfalls and towering trees that we are tiny and humble. Ultimately, we are at the disposal of the natural world and not the other way around. If we had control, what need would we have for all this patience?

William Berry didn't call it patience, but he nonetheless knew what I mean: "We spend great energy in mental processes wishing things were different than they are. Wishing the traffic jam didn’t exist. Wishing the boss were a little nicer, wishing our children would take our advice, wishing, wishing, wishing. Acceptance is a key to a happier life. If we can just try to accept what is, and that wanting otherwise is often wasted energy, we will be happier. We would be better able to experience the moment more fully with this state of mind."

well how I curse that western skyline

I left Louisville in the burning heat. The first week of July in Southern Indiana traditionally welcomes a sticky, heavy summer air. Your feet beg to be released from shoes and a halo of hair sticks determinately to the rim of your forehead. So I climbed on a plane.

After a couple of days in Philadelphia we flew to Niger, where I met a sort of hot I'd never known. It was sweltering, blistering and drier than I thought possible. My lips chapped, my skin roasted, and in the heat of the day I laid prostrate in my hut with my skirt hiked up, sweating buckets and trying not to die.

A headache in this sort of weather taught me a new lesson in...patience.

But after weeks in this environment, my body blessedly adjusted. (It's incredible what we can endure.) When rainy season ended, taking with it its nightly relief, we were tossed unprepared into a mini hot season. Somehow, the air became even drier, tossing sand, trash and very small rocks into the air to cruelly pelt the skin. To look at the calendar, though, it still made sense for it to be hot. Perhaps this was a new level, but the concept of late summer heat was neither new nor unatural.

Then came October, and the summer roared on.

After I moved to Kollo, the air morphed again into what we were calling "Cold Season." It sounded absurd, I'm sure, to those few precious people who I talked to during this time, that I was shivering in 80 degree weather, but we donned hoodies and leggings to battle the new "cold" air. Many even moved indoors for the chilly nights, and I was told often by my villagers that I should follow suit to guard against an oncoming cold.

Sure enough, I was soon coughing and sneezing with my annual sinus infection.
November was fall; breezes in the village tossed black plastic bags into the air like fallen leaves. I huddled down, guzzingling instant coffee and hot chocolate I'd received in a package, trying to stay warm as temperatures dipped into the 60s at night.

But before I knew it, the calendar declared it was December, then January, and it was still an autumn I would've once called summer. The stranger the weather, the farther Niger felt from home; cool air thrust into me a homesickness for which I hadn't yet discovered a cure. I returned to Hamdallaye for In-Service Training (IST) grateful not only for the break from Village Life, but also for the long-awaited companionship of my fellow Americans, certain they'd re-ground my mind, which was spinning as rapidly as the whirlling winds of Cold Season.

Then we received the evacutation notice.

When we landed in Morocco two days later, Peace Corps allowed us a small amount of money to buy warmer clothes, aware at very least that we were completely unprepared for any sort of actual cold. We shivered and complained, and the weather made the whole ordeal seem all the more surreal.
Of course as you've read, from there I travelled through Europe in the gripse of legitimate winter. We purchased gloves, hats, coats and turtlenecks from the African market, but we were still no where close to ready for such low temperatures.

Or for those sweeping grey skies.

For the months of January and February, I was in snowless winter, biting winds whipped cruelly around aged cathedrals and along frigid canals. Hostels were seriously cold, often lacking central heat, and my Africa-accustommed body continued to shiver late into every morning. The pace of the adventure kept me warm enough, however, and while I vivdly remember being cold, it never felt like a winter I had known.

We huddled around space heaters and tucked ourselves under thick blankets.
In Prague I saw snow for the first time but only to fly to Ireland the same day and be greeted by the traditional endless rain. But for all the times I called it winter, Ireland insisted it was spring. At the turn of March, the daffodils were already in full bloom, sweeping spectacularly across countrysides already a richer green than even the Midwest boasts. Spring blooms spilled from windowboxes, and I busied myself planting seeds and infant flowers on the Cape.

Even as I was leaving six weeks later, it was surely spring, temperatures dipping low in the night only to rise again in the longer sun. I spent my last day in the country tossing a frisbee at St. Stephen's Green with another travelling American, only to shiver my way home despite his leather jacket and a Stout Irish Beer Coat.

So I flew to Alabama. In the South, spring was a whole different beast. Azaela bushes screamed from the front of every home and Crepe Murtles bore blooms the like of which we can't imagine up north. But these are early bloomers, and even though the warmth invited sandalled feet, I couldn't be fooled into believing it was summer. Storms blew in, as you likely heard, and I hudled one afternoon alone in my brother's apartment bathroom praying passionately for a quick and quiet end to spring's tornado season.

When I arrived back along the Ohio, where I spent a slow three weeks, I finally began detecting summer around the corner. I could wear t-shirts again for the first time since Niger, and the air didn't bite so sharply in the evenings. In fact, just before I left again, I spotted my first lightning bug, a sure sign of early summer.

But mostly, it was still spring. And so I flew to California.

Now, they say it doesn't rain here, but they lie. In fact, yesterday I meandered home from Yosemite Village to my tent near Curry Village, past massive trees, dumping waterfalls and towering cliffs, traversing the quick, ice-cold, crystal-clear river, in a mean, pelting sleet. By the time I arrived home, the sun was back to shining. Yosemite survived a hellish winter; the high camps are likely to be closed until mid-July at best because of extraordinary snow. Now in June, the Valley is gushing with water from every angle, and conversations rarely forget to include flood predictions, but the dogwoods and the redbuds remind me everyday that I'm still in the heart of spring, for my fifth consecutive month.

"Adopt the pace of nature;" Emerson wrote, "her secret is patience," but maybe he never knew a year like the one I just lived. I wish more than anything to find this Truth in myself somewhere, but despite myself, I'm looking forward to heat more than ever. I miss the baking Nigerien sun, and the way your cheeks get tight as sweat dries. I want warm nights and long, hot hikes through the backcountry. I want to get to know the Yosemite summer.

We're lucky at home to enjoy all four seasons, and I've relied on them for a lifetime to tell me that time is passing. Perhaps this is why I forget sometimes that a year has passed since I tossed that pack on my back for the first time in my parent's driveway, bound unimaginably for Africa.

But it did, even if it didn't turn out as I could have expected.

It seems reasonable some days to say it was just a year, just one twenty-third of my tale, just one or two chapters, maybe. But it wasn't just a year. Still stuck in this endless spring, it occurs to me that even when the heat hits as it surely will, life won't come full circle as perhaps I've allowed myself to imagine.
Perhaps in reality I will never be the same.

Vol. 4: a ticket home

I've neglected this blog for the last couple of months, so a special thanks to anyone still reading it. I had my traditional wordy, rambling post written, carrying us from the morning I awoke on my own in Prague to the day I landed in the Birmingham airport at one in the morning, exhausted and without luggage, but unfortunately my Macbook's hard drive recently went ka-put, taking my precious InDesign, blog post and a library of music I'd joyously downloaded with it to the grave. Kala suuru.

So I am offering only the abridged version of the story here, partly because my rewrites always turn out sloppy and also because I've been recently blessed with the opportunity to share much of this story with family and friends in person.

Because in case you didn't hear, I am finally back in the States.

However, I am no longer in Louisville. We'll get to that in a moment. For now lets rewind back to the Czech-Inn, one of my favorite hostels in Europe, where I woke groggy and hungover to the sight of a strip a clean, bright sun filtering in through the thick curtains onto the dorm floor. I laid under my thick, Moroccan blanket for a few moments staring blindly at the spot before it registered: where Nichole's pack should have been was just a runway of empty light. According to my journal, I rolled back over, sighed and fell back into a protesting sleep.

When I finally convinced myself to go down for a coffee, I was more awake but no more enthused about my new reality; I was alone.

I stepped into the bright lobby, steaming mug in hand, and stopped dead: it snowed. I know no one will pity me when I say that it was the first (previously only) snow I'd seen that winter and it was only a quarter inch, but it changed everything.

Now, I know it wasn't actually the snow. I already had a new adventure booked, tickets to Ireland tucked into my planner, and still without a set date to return to America, my European bubble was existing firmly, wildly without an expiration date. But I'd gone to bed in one reality and woken to an entirely new one again.

For heaven's sake, how many times can that happen in a year?

Now separate from my travel mates, I was leaving the world in which Things Made Sense and entering a uniquely misunderstood existence. By now you've realized I have a tendency to be melodramatic, but in this case there is some reason to be. Since that morning, I haven't had a single two-way conversation about Niger. I can talk and talk and talk, I can write and write and write, but I can make no better sense of it. Anymore, it doesn't sound real to me, and I lived it. To those who have had no contact with that world, explanations fall abysmally short. The thoughts that cross my mind on a daily basis, those about Niger, about Djamila, about my loved ones there and the precious times we had, I must hold privately. They can't possibly register the way I need them to; I am alone. So, as I crunched my way through the streets of Prague to the airport that morning, nothing else mattered; I was alone.

The melancholy of it all did not wear away for the several days it took to travel to Dublin, then Cork and finally to Baltimore, where I caught my ferry to Cape Clear Island. To be even more honest, even now I'm not certain the blue has fully receded from my post-Peace Corps existence. But we're getting there.

I arrived in Ireland with only a vague idea of where I was going, and it was a testament to how far I'd come in the past year that I was unperturbed by the lack of details. I made it to the island, where I hoped someone would pick me up on the pier. And I could grasp only to the belief that things would fall into place.

Which of course they did. I spent the following six weeks on the Cape, doing odd jobs around the grounds of the pubs and guest accommodations where I lived with a Kiwi and the friend-of-a-friend I'd met briefly in Germany. We took instructions from a chain-smoking South African woman. In the evenings we'd tromp through the bouncy, emerald grass to the cliffs where we'd watch birds sail and dive as the sun went down. We climbed into the ruins of an old castle one afternoon, and we saw the standing stones, the cemetery, the inland lake. We spent St. Patrick's Day in Cork. Every Thursday I took an evening pottery class in North Harbor. Nights were in the pubs, either pulling pints or drinking them, where over time I finally adjusted to the melody and variance of the Irish accent. But every foggy morning, my ability to understand faded again. At one point, I turned 23. And we listened to the stories, and we listened to the songs, and it was just about as poetic as it sounds. And yes, there were loads of spuds.

But before I knew it I was bidding goodbye to this new home too, and to a tall, ginger Irishman. I spent two nights in a hostel in Dublin before that crazy flight back to the States. I was bound for Birmingham to spend some time in my brother's new home. Unfortunately, it was the hardest travel day of my life, but that's a story worthy of a lively telling the next time we meet. After about 26 hours, I was seated in the humid Southern air again, waiting desperately for the sight of my tall, bearded brother, the first of my loved ones to be within hugging distance for roughly ten months.

But not just any ten months.

After Birmingham, I travelled to St. Louis to meet my dad, who was working there. And I had a whole new chance to try, try, try to tell my stories again. After a couple of days, we drove back home, where we found my mom digging in her flower gardens. And I tried again. The next week I went back to Muncie to see my old friends, another new audience for all these crazy things I have to say. But mostly we all laughed and hugged and celebrated, and I discovered that the few people who had kept in touch with me during my time away really were the best of the people that I knew.

But it took only about three weeks for stagnation to drive me crazy, and so last Tuesday I climbed onto another plane, headed even further West.

I'm living in Yosemite National Park for the summer, where a couple of people I love and trust have said I might find peace. And if that isn't the goal of all this wandering, I'm not sure what is.