On the Level

I have grown accustomed to the raucous banging of the metal garage doors located right under my room, though I sometimes resent my host father’s habit of opening them just before my alarm goes off in the morning.

It actually seems characteristic of almost every door in the village to require a great deal more force and volume to open than it is worth expending to enter the rooms beyond. Most are old and wooden; thin, and heavily inlaid with molding so that they look like they were stripped from some lavish beach house where they once hung straight. Now, they lean into one another or against doorframes that have been cut crooked into the cement walls. Most are meant to open like French doors, but one half sticks or has been neglected and remains always closed: a wall masquerading as a door.

Much of the furniture is afflicted with a similar disfigurement. It is rare to find a cabinet door that closes, most of them colliding with each other or part of the cabinet frame, and many of the drawers are too narrow for their tracks. They collapse into the drawers or cabinets below them, creating a knot of cheap plastic and laminated particleboard. Some mornings my jigsaw of a dresser requires more problem solving skills than I have ready five minutes out of bed. But the pieces of a puzzle fit together, whereas it would be difficult to convince me that the doors of my wardrobe could sit flush even if the entire structure did not lean precariously to one side.

Today, there was a greater commotion than the usual door clanging that accompanies my host father returning to the house. I pry open my bedroom door to see my host father’s little black sedan towing what was once the back of a sea foam green pick-up truck through the front gate. The truck bed looks like a display stolen from some high school’s Octoberfest or Fall Ball. It is loaded with ears of corn. Their fraying heads poke out of the openings in overstuffed white cloth sacks sitting on a bed of loose ears that comes right up to the lip of the truck.

I try to imagine the control it must have required for my host father to drive slow enough to maintain this cargo. Certainly the usual Georgian driving attitude of accelerating until you encounter an obstacle would not have been practical with this load.

When the car has been maneuvered into the small garage, my host father and sister lift the truck bed off the tow hitch and wheel it around to the side of the house where Bebia (Grandmother) is waiting on a wooden bench. She immediately begins to shuck the ears of corn, an activity that consumes most of the family well into the evening. They pile the naked yellow ears into plastic barrels and haul the shells away in laundry baskets.

My host father holds a bright golden ear in one hand and a pale butter colored ear in the other. “American, “ he says, brandishing the golden ear, and then, “Kartuli,” (Georgian) as he hands me the paler corn.

No one can articulate to me what any one family could do with this much corn, but as it begins to grow dark the task of unloading the truck is abandoned for the day.  The family moves inside to watch a favorite soap opera. I can hear the droning Georgian voice-over overlapping the sharp staccato of the original Spanish dialogue, the Georgian phrases never completely covering the Spanish ones. The sound bleeds through the floorboards of my room, where the wooden planks can't quite reach the thin cement wall.