Malaysia has a distinctive smell. I especially notice it in the morning when I first open the door to check on the laundry and the stray cat who frequents our yard, or to say goodbye to my husband as he leaves for his hour-long commute to work. It’s not a pleasant smell, but not unpleasant, either. It just is. And I imagine myself as an old woman some day catching a whiff of something and saying nostalgically, “That smells like Malaysia.” By then these two years will be a faded, fleeting memory, but today they are not, and they stretch ahead of me like a blank canvas waiting for the artist to begin his work. He has given me no hint of his plans, his style, his medium, his vision.
Our house is on a corner, on a sort of cul-de-sac, really a dead end with a wall. So to drive anywhere you have to go around three sides of the block to get to the street that leads out of our gated community. I realized this morning that you can clearly see the third corner of that progression out our back kitchen window. I glanced out idly just as my husband rounded the corner on his way to the office. I thought that if I were a newly-wed I would have discovered that window view weeks ago, and stood there to watch every morning after he left the house for one last glimpse of him, but I am not a newly-wed. I am a wife about to turn fifty after twenty-two years of kissing my husband good-bye most mornings. Sometimes he leaves for work before I am out of bed. There are some things which a global move has not changed.
It surprises me how quickly I have become used to the subtleties of the weather here. I imagined the climate as one long, unbroken stream of hot, humid air, and laughed when I heard that people distinguished between 85 and 88 degree days - I, who was accustomed to days when the temperature may vary 40 or 50 degrees between 5 AM and 2 PM - but I find my thermostat has already become more fine-tuned. I hear myself saying things like, “Oh, it’s not as hot this morning” with an element of true surprise in my voice. But I find myself still expecting the thermometer to observe a Northern schedule, albeit in a severely truncated range; I am still surprised to step outside at 11 PM and find it has grown hotter than it was at 8. Things are supposed to cool off overnight and heat up in the morning. Not so in Malaysia.
I am also learning to sweat gracefully. Well, maybe not gracefully, but a little more graciously. I come from a long line of pale complected English sorts who turn red in the face and wet all over when the humidity begins to rise. I have always hated heat for that reason and made sure anyone within earshot knew it. Now that I cannot escape it (if I'm outdoors - there is always air conditioning), I find I am beginning to make peace with the sticky dampness. I seem to spend less time fretting over the heat when there is no hope of it abating in a day or two, and I am getting better at ignoring the moisture that is dripping off my nose and down my shirt. Besides, I console myself, I could be wearing a head scarf and long sleeves like half the women in Malaysia.
I cooked my first “Indian” meal two days ago – not very good, really. It was nothing like the food at Al Awahz on the corner (I always want to call it Al Jazeerah since they always have that on the TV when we are there.) Both dishes I cooked were OK, but neither had the real bite of true Indian food, in spite of the fact that I had just filled fifteen spice jars with seeds and powders never before seen in my kitchen. I have a lot to learn.
As I write one of my daughters is downstairs picking out the melody to “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” on the piano. I am surprised every time I write the date to realize that November is drawing to a close. It feels like August – in more ways than one. Christmas seems like a long way away still – maybe two years away. I don’t even find myself nostalgic about Christmas, at least not yet, because it seems like mid-summer, and who dreams about Christmas in August? Yesterday I hung up the primitive wooden snowman inscribed with the words, “Let It Snow” next to our front door, on the wall in between the shoe cupboard (no shoes in the house), the mosaic and the heavy dark wood door. He looks good there, though I am afraid his words will not seem prophetic like they always did in New Hampshire.
One of the many things that has changed since we moved is the size of our family; not because we moved, just coincidentally at the same time, but we sit down to dinner at the table we had custom made for 12 and sort of huddle toward the middle, a small company of seven some nights, only six the nights Claire works at the restaurant. The room is huge, the sounds echo off the marble floors and bounce back from the twelve foot ceilings. We feel as small and insignificant in our own house as we do outside. We miss the days of bumping elbows around a crowded kitchen table with ourselves and our guests; we miss chatting with each other while we wait in line for the shower on Sunday mornings or the bathroom before bed. We miss complaining about how long so and so is taking. Now we can all linger in the shower and no one cares.
This morning as I showered in my huge tiled bath the words from an old Keith Green song somehow slipped into my mind, "Nothing lasts except the grace of God." And I realized that even if we had never made this move, if we had hung onto the security of our lives in small-town New Hampshire, still nothing would last, everything would still change. A and R would still have flown away to India and New Zealand,would still only come home for a brief hiatus before going to college - the prelude to going away for good. My "baby" would still learn to read and to swim and to take care of herselfvery well, thank you. Nothing lasts, but that one fact; nothing is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow but that one Person.
I've decided that the best advice I've heard this year was the last thing my pastor said to me when we left Vermont, "Enjoy the ride." Some parts are more exciting than others, some stretches fly by, some will give you whiplash, others seems to climb endlessly. Once the train starts there's no jumping off, so you might as well enjoy the ride. I'm trying to.
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