Hitting the One year Mark
I saw Leslie this weekend in Plopeni. We both went back for a one year reunion but I really went to say goodbye. Leslie leaves at the end of the week she has thrown in the peace corps towel. We went running in the morning as was our custom all summer. "january, " she sighed, "was a hard month." It was hard to remember january at that moment, the sun filtered through the populars and the smell of damp earth hit my nose each time my feet beat the pavement. I nodded in aquiesence. We stopped just as the forest broke into an apple orchard. We continued to walk toward the tiny village of Cocorasi where we had run nearly every morning of the previous summer. Past the orchard, fields of corn stood in tiny little nubbly rows. Peasant women like hunched bumps in the horizon picked at the dirt with their wooden hoes. It was such a familiar path... Last summer jogging with Leslie was my seven am torture and pleasure. She was the running Nazi. "Come on Nina, just a bit farther." she pleaded with me daily. Though in the end I usually got her to walk a while longer with me. Those summer mornings we jogged and gossiped and planned about when we "got to site." "I am going to learn to play guitar." I remember declaring over and over again. "I am going to make things happen." Now a year past "getting to site," Leslie told me of her plans for home. It's not that she didn't like Romania, she said, It's just that she was past teaching and needed to move on. What I love about Leslie is her willingness to get out and act on what she feels. If she doesn't like something she outright says it.."No, i don't like hardboiled eggs." And that's it. There is no choking them down and pretending to enjoy it for the sake of being polite. She's not rude, that's not it, she's determined. She knows what she wants. That's just it, she knows what she wants. I was with Leslie when I decided to cut my hair. "I am really proud that you actually did it, Nina." she said to me afterwards. i smiled at the compliment. She knows how much I hate decision. I wish to be as impulsive and sure of my decisions as her. So Leslie is off to Russia. "Why?" you ask. Because she simply wants to learn Russian and always has. "And where's the money in it, the direction forward, the career move?" At the moment she aims to master the Russian and then apply to grad school in Russian and Eastern European studies. As for me, I am just at the end of the first year of teaching and I am not quite through with teaching, and teaching is not quite through with me. Summer, my shining moment of the year has arrived and so has the camp season. IF there is anything that I'm good at, it's being a camp counselor, and so I shall. I shall sing my head of and introduce smores to the Romanian youth and get dirty. I will once again eat wormy cherries...(I have grown acustomed to bugs at lot bigger) and next year I pledge to work on my guitar. I guess I better buy one.