Think Russia, Not Peaches: Before I Sleep

It's wednesday morning. I'm laying in bed listening to the wheezing of my electric heater, waiting for it to take the night chill out of my boots, when I hear my host mother bang open the door to her room at the other end of the balcony, and exclaim loudly in Georgian. I'm not sure precisely what she says, but I do manage to make out the word "tovs," derived from "tovli," or "snow." I pull back the curtain of my window with a clatter, the rusty curtain rings clacking against the metal rod, and I am met with a wall of white drifting over the lawn and the road. The flakes are so large, and the fall so thick, I can barely see across the street into Natia's hazelnut field.

We watch out the school windows as the branches of the tall pines along the road bend under the wet flakes that pile quickly into heavy drifts. Every break between classes is twice as long. The children rush from their classrooms into the school yard, barely out the door before they are flinging snow at one another. When I join the fray, it becomes a rather violent game of "Pelt the Foreigner," but I hold my ground reasonably well. When my host sister and her friends attempt to pin me down to give the other students a chance for free shots, I decide I have had enough snow playtime.

At home I shovel the walk to the front gate and the one to the toilet using a rusty shovel with a large tree branch for a handle and in the evening I visit Natia, who has prepared ghomi with garlic and onions as well as fish satsiva. After dinner, Shotiko, Giorgi, and I head outside into the quickly fading evening light to build a snowman, Tovlis Babua (literally "snow grandfather," which is also what they call santa). The boys begin rolling the snow into huge boulders to form the snowman's body. However, this quickly becomes a competition of whose-snowball-is-bigger, and I finally have to sit on the snow to make them stop before the mounds become to heavy for us to lift.

It is not the best looking snowman I have ever made, but I certainly felt accomplished finishing it with Gio constantly kicking snow off the base and punching holes in the middle layer. When we finally drag him inside, he cries as his numb hands come back to life by the fire.

Since it is wet and cold I, of corse, have to walk to the tiny shack housing our hole-in-the-ground toilet several times during the night. I begrudge having to abandon the pocket of relative warmth in my bed, though my toes are still numb from the cold leaking in through the broken window over my head. I follow my flashlight around the house, but it is of little use when I reach the open yard in the back. The moonlight glitters everywhere. The karaleoke trees, barn, and chicken coop sparkle like the stars blazing in the clear-black sky, and it seems as if the world has been dipped in silver and the night hung with black velvet.

It's strange sometimes, the places that we find beauty. As much as I hate to admit it, when I met the world dressed in ebony and diamonds, I was on my way to the outhouse dressed in leggings, hiking boots, and a hoody. Standing alone on the rough laid cement path leading to what is quite literally a shit-hole, I can't help but feel a little like the snow and the moonlight are here just for me. My host sister often jokes with me, when the moon is particularly bright, saying, "Hannah, it's my moon," and I think that it comes from the feeling that all this brilliance has to be here for some reason. So why not some one, and why not me?

I had been feeling a little worn down about living in Georgia and being away from home, but the snow made everything seem new. It reminded me that good things often come in unexpected packages, and, as such, it never hurts to keep your eyes open. When the biting cold gets me moving again I can't help but succumb to a couple lines from Robert Frost:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

but I have promises to keep,

and miles to go before I sleep,

and miles to go before I sleep.

It seems like miles of walking through the cold back to my now frigid bed, miles to my friends scattered around the country, and miles to my home, across what I imagine in the snow to be a very cold ocean. But think, just think, of all these sweet snowy nights waiting here for me.