Turkey and Egypt: Long days, feral cats and breathing rituals

When the winter cough subsides
the body gives way to new air
and expels the old.
Exhaling, deep from the bottoms of the lungs
it rises; sifting up through all the things unsaid.
Head, thrown back.
Eyes, open and skyward.
Mouth, gasping at the green-filled, luscious air of spring.
Mind, calm in the knowledge that the only healer was time,
the only way: through.

Friday afternoon. She is sitting in her apartment eating peanuts and drinking a Beck’s. Crap! She says to herself. Has it really been almost three months since I last wrote a blog? It couldn’t be…

Where have I been, she wonders to herself, as she gazes out her window - down to the valley below and the apartment buildings stacked one atop the other and the old women taking down their laundry after another sunny, dry, warm day.

And what has happened in these last three months?

She remembers darkness… the coming of evening at 5, the late arrival of morning at 7:30. The feeling of the heavy, insatiable wanderlust that pulled at her feet as she boarded the bus to go to work as she slid across the taxi seat to go to work as she walked down the hill in the morning darkness to go to work.

Where have I been, she thinks, whispering the words aloud.

There were long days babysitting spoiled children, there was a trip to Egypt, an urgent mutual attempt at a failed relationship.

And now, as she watches the seagulls gliding past her 4th story window… the call to prayer begins; mixes with the sounds of the acapella Cambridge Singers choir practice CD she has made to practice her soprano part.

She could turn it off, she should turn it off, but the eerie juxtaposition of the Abendlied “Evening Prayers” with the high, yearning, moaning, off-key prayer of the mosque’s neighborhood bellower seems fitting somehow. Singing is as close to praying as she's going to get this year.

Soon, the dogs join in the howling and everything is hungry and sated all at once. Then, the feral cats downstairs join in their yearly spring growling, and she is sure, once and for all, that spring has sprung.