There are four whites in the sky at night: blossom, snow on the mountains, stars and the moon. I arrived home 'after dark' beneath all this white and for a moment saw my garden reflect the night-sky like a still pond. The ground twinkled with starlight. In the first spring breeze, petals had drifted in and were radiant with moonlight at my feet.
Something else must have drifted in on the breeze: whispered beauty tips, for everything is looking good. Who told the mist to sneak between the the branches of a sparsely blossomed tree just so? Whoever it was I'm glad, it's a great pastel-and-watercolour Japanese scene art lesson sorted. Who advised just such a green to stripe the grey fields? Even the concrete and stone of every building looks right with this season's flora.
I wondered why, when so much life was springing up among the stone, there was yet a desolate feel, an uncanny quiet, as half the populace is absent. It's the goats: gone, leaving a ghost town behind, giving ascendancy to the plant kingdom at last. They're not actually gone, there's been no blood-letting since Eid, they're just behind bars, presumably doing time for some crime against nature or at least cultivated plant-life that their ancestors once committed. I have to feed my vegetable waste to them stealthily now. I give pea-pods to one I see chained up, slipping them into her diet of straw. She loves me, I know it.
The cherry tree in the school-yard opposite my house was the first in town to explode into a candyfloss mass of flowers, so Young Scholars Public Academy and College must be doing something right even while educating far too many children in what is actually just a family house.
Saturday morning, 9 am and my waking dreams mingle with the opening lines of 'Pak sar Zamin', the national anthem that chases sleep away. I am told through song by a hundred children or more that I wake to a nation exemplary to all nations, a sultanate superlative in every way. As I stumble to my coffee-pot we're glad the land bestows such happiness and we bow to the republic and I light the gas. They have school on Saturday and I don't: another source of happiness.
"Come to scholar, go to leader,' boasts the motto on the school sign, filling me with wonder, puzzlement and hope in equal measure. The children are certainly going somewhere. As I walk up the hill on a weekday morning I pass them all in crisp white uniforms either hurtling or toddling, 'coming to scholar, going to leader,' as their badges also say. Indeed one lass has wee scholarly specs already.
Well I hope some of them do go to leader, I really do, but even if they don't, I simply hope they will continue to go to school at all, for on some days, when the triumvirate of turmoil, terror and all-talk-and-no-action tyrannises particularly badly, it is a hopeful thing to see girls - yes, especially girls, as the town has had a visit from the other terrible T from the west - going to school. It is good, also, to walk past soldiers in helmets with story books in my bag on my way to teach. I teach how to do a watercolour wash; how to count in tens or tenths; why the Highwayman loved Bess, the landlord's black-eyed daughter; where Spot might be hiding. Is he under the stairs?
Meanwhile the current leaders in the capitol could certainly do with 'coming to scholar', having a retreat under the cherry tree, maybe, and pondering the vision of the national anthem.
We celebrate the first day of spring and traditional new year tomorrow with a festival called New Day, Nawroz. "Why is it tomorrow when spring started on Tuesday last week?" one bright spark asks. Out come the torch, globe, and orange (not to scale, children). "Well, class, when the sun is as so, we call it the equinox..." I'm fooling no one. Everyone knows spring started on the 12th. We all kicked of our blankets that night and in the morning felt it time to open the drawer marked 'summer clothes' and put away yesterday's woolens till next year. I opened the door and went back in for sun-cream. The snow began to melt and the stream ran rich after the frozen months. And from that day, as quickly as the snow retreated, the blossom bloomed as if the valley could not bear to be without something white and fluffly between the rock and the hard place. My garden smells of honey.
I guess the newspapers don't mention that.
I know it's true of nature. I hope it's true of the nation.
Something else must have drifted in on the breeze: whispered beauty tips, for everything is looking good. Who told the mist to sneak between the the branches of a sparsely blossomed tree just so? Whoever it was I'm glad, it's a great pastel-and-watercolour Japanese scene art lesson sorted. Who advised just such a green to stripe the grey fields? Even the concrete and stone of every building looks right with this season's flora.
I wondered why, when so much life was springing up among the stone, there was yet a desolate feel, an uncanny quiet, as half the populace is absent. It's the goats: gone, leaving a ghost town behind, giving ascendancy to the plant kingdom at last. They're not actually gone, there's been no blood-letting since Eid, they're just behind bars, presumably doing time for some crime against nature or at least cultivated plant-life that their ancestors once committed. I have to feed my vegetable waste to them stealthily now. I give pea-pods to one I see chained up, slipping them into her diet of straw. She loves me, I know it.
The cherry tree in the school-yard opposite my house was the first in town to explode into a candyfloss mass of flowers, so Young Scholars Public Academy and College must be doing something right even while educating far too many children in what is actually just a family house.
Saturday morning, 9 am and my waking dreams mingle with the opening lines of 'Pak sar Zamin', the national anthem that chases sleep away. I am told through song by a hundred children or more that I wake to a nation exemplary to all nations, a sultanate superlative in every way. As I stumble to my coffee-pot we're glad the land bestows such happiness and we bow to the republic and I light the gas. They have school on Saturday and I don't: another source of happiness.
"Come to scholar, go to leader,' boasts the motto on the school sign, filling me with wonder, puzzlement and hope in equal measure. The children are certainly going somewhere. As I walk up the hill on a weekday morning I pass them all in crisp white uniforms either hurtling or toddling, 'coming to scholar, going to leader,' as their badges also say. Indeed one lass has wee scholarly specs already.
Well I hope some of them do go to leader, I really do, but even if they don't, I simply hope they will continue to go to school at all, for on some days, when the triumvirate of turmoil, terror and all-talk-and-no-action tyrannises particularly badly, it is a hopeful thing to see girls - yes, especially girls, as the town has had a visit from the other terrible T from the west - going to school. It is good, also, to walk past soldiers in helmets with story books in my bag on my way to teach. I teach how to do a watercolour wash; how to count in tens or tenths; why the Highwayman loved Bess, the landlord's black-eyed daughter; where Spot might be hiding. Is he under the stairs?
Meanwhile the current leaders in the capitol could certainly do with 'coming to scholar', having a retreat under the cherry tree, maybe, and pondering the vision of the national anthem.
We celebrate the first day of spring and traditional new year tomorrow with a festival called New Day, Nawroz. "Why is it tomorrow when spring started on Tuesday last week?" one bright spark asks. Out come the torch, globe, and orange (not to scale, children). "Well, class, when the sun is as so, we call it the equinox..." I'm fooling no one. Everyone knows spring started on the 12th. We all kicked of our blankets that night and in the morning felt it time to open the drawer marked 'summer clothes' and put away yesterday's woolens till next year. I opened the door and went back in for sun-cream. The snow began to melt and the stream ran rich after the frozen months. And from that day, as quickly as the snow retreated, the blossom bloomed as if the valley could not bear to be without something white and fluffly between the rock and the hard place. My garden smells of honey.
I guess the newspapers don't mention that.
*******************
"You must be foreign; come in for a cup of tea."
I am foreign; I do go in for a cup of tea (served, satisfyingly, with fried meat and cake). My hostess is a sprightly grandmother. We discuss poetry. First a zabour by the ancient poet Hazrat Daud that says, 'The heavens declare the glory of God.' She believes it and so do I. She nips out and returns with a treasured possession, a handsome volume of Christina Rossetti's poems which she wants me to explain when I next come round. (pray!)
It begins with a section on spring. In "There is a Budding Morrow in Midnight" I read,
I am foreign; I do go in for a cup of tea (served, satisfyingly, with fried meat and cake). My hostess is a sprightly grandmother. We discuss poetry. First a zabour by the ancient poet Hazrat Daud that says, 'The heavens declare the glory of God.' She believes it and so do I. She nips out and returns with a treasured possession, a handsome volume of Christina Rossetti's poems which she wants me to explain when I next come round. (pray!)
It begins with a section on spring. In "There is a Budding Morrow in Midnight" I read,
Winter is the mother-nurse of Spring,
Lovely for her daughter's sake
Not unlovely for her own:
For a future buds in everything;
Grown, or blown,
Or about to break.
Lovely for her daughter's sake
Not unlovely for her own:
For a future buds in everything;
Grown, or blown,
Or about to break.
I know it's true of nature. I hope it's true of the nation.
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