Snow makes an odd crunching sound when you step on it. It’s weird the things you forget after
3½ years. It’s like something
breaking under your foot, a crunch or a slipping noise, like water splashing in
slow motion, like slush slowed down.
The snow on Kilimanjaro was glacial, slippery and hard, shiny when the
sun rose, dry and brittle with age where it struck out thin and jagged over
tourist-warn sandy paths along the ridge.
But the snow today was soft, too wet and squishy to last more than a day
or so, and its wet crunching was surprisingly reminiscent of the drier crunch
of ice at 5,895 meters. I remember
seeing the snow up there that morning and thinking it looked different; what I
didn’t know until today was that snow is the same here or there, it’s just my
memory that has worn down.
I forgot about snow like I forgot about this skirt I found
in my closet, because a snow day is a good day to throw your clothes away, to
lay the shoes all out on the floor, try them on and think “why did I ever wear
these?” or “wow these make me feel tall.”
I was wandering between the shoes on the floor and the shirts on the bed
and the closet hung with dresses and scarves and the cardboard box mixed with
summer clothes and winter hats and legwarmers, and suddenly like a blast from
the past I reached in to blindly grab a hanger and came out with that skirt.
You know the one.
The one you bought and always swore you’d wear but you didn’t, the one
you thought you might aspire to fit into, the one you were going to build your
new wardrobe around when you grew up and your style changed, the one that was
going to be perfect for you someday when you were somebody else. It’s like the pair of jeans a size too
small that you never throw away, the too-high heels you roll your eyes at
vaguely when reaching for your sneakers in the morning, the impractical lace-up
boots you can’t be bothered with, the absurdly fancy dress you bought abroad
and will never wear anywhere, the stiff cotton dress you had tailor-made for
you in Zambia out of cloth patterned in drums and water-carrying women and
masks, which doesn’t quite fit you right and where would you wear it anyway but
oh god you can’t throw that away what if you NEED it later?
This was that skirt.
In my case, an insanely royal purple skirt with stripes of gentle floral
linen and thick velvet and shiny satin, a hodgepodge of textured lines
patterning down past the knees; something I bought to wear someday on my
hypothetical future bohemian days when I would hypothetically own hippie-chic
clothes and hypothetically wear them with scarves and boots and bangles;
something that, of course, ultimately sat unused in my closet for years,
waiting patiently for some cold Halloween when I would begrudgingly dig it out
and wear it as part of a hastily-assembled gypsy-pirate costume. But I still kept it, because I was going
to be the type of bohemian girl who might wear flowy floral purple skirts of
various materials, one day. Or so
I used to tell myself.
And there it was, four years later, some forgotten idea left
skeletal and cold in the back of my closet.
It’s funny the things you forget about. Like:
Some clothes are dry-clean only. That means you don’t dump them in a plastic bucket and slosh
them around in sticky blue soap and too-cold water until they are stretched
beyond all recognition and then hang them on the clothesline to dry and fade in
the sun, like you might do with your other clothes. Actually, you don’t do that with any of your clothes,
here. Too cold, for one thing, and
there isn’t the space for it—no sunlit outdoor clearing to do your laundry in,
just closed-in insulated rooms where doing the washing by hand means a mess on
the wood or tile floors. But the
clothes that say “dry clean only” on the tags? Those you have to watch for—you have to actually read the
care tags, rather then shoving them all in the bucket willy-nilly—and then you
have to take them to this store where they wash them without water using
chemicals or something, I don’t really understand it, but the point is it
exists and it’s expensive and environmentally horrifying and completely (or
mostly) necessary in order to successfully wear the clothes in public. I’m used to a world where you can wear
what you want, sometimes two days in a row, and not worry about the state of
wear of the fabric or how difficult it will be to keep clean, not worry if it
pills or fades or stretches, not worry about the fashion or the
weather-appropriate status of the garment; that world does not exist here.
People generally shower everyday, here. Not just the clean-freak ones with the wet
wipes in their purses, not just the ones who work hard and need to shower
often, but everyone, even the ones who don’t have anywhere in particular to be
today, they’re still probably going to shower today. Possibly twice.
And there’s no need to rush, either—there’s no real danger that the
water is going to suddenly run out or turn cold, you can take a moment to just
feel the hot water pour down and though you may feel slightly guilty and wasteful,
you won’t actually make so much of a difference that you deprive someone else
in the household of their cleanliness.
And if you do rush—or if you shower for what you have come to see as a
“normal” length of time—others will blink at you and say, “wow, that was
fast.” Because daily showers can
take a whole ten minutes here, and that is somehow normal.
New England is cold.
You think you know cold when you’re sitting in your un-insulated mud hut
during a thunderstorm huddled around a lit brazier that you probably shouldn’t
have inside because of carbon monoxide but oh well it’s so windy through the
windows the fumes will blow right out, but no, actually, that cold only felt
cold because you were wearing sandals and linen pants. In fact, cold is biting, cold is
red-faced and harsh, cold is slippery-white-salty ground and wet grass and dry
air, cold is aching and pinching and awful. Cold is more than I remembered.
The American supermarket has approximately 80,000 different
brands, sizes, flavors, and types of yogurt. The milk section has a minimum of four brands, plus at least
two organic brands, and comes in skim ½% 1% 1½% 2% full cream, and then there’s
rice milk and soymilk and creamers and whipping creams and sour creams and
shaving creams and also, sometimes eggs are bleached a disturbing white color
and come in white Styrofoam. The
vegetables are all inside the store, the greens water-dusted in the corner, the
fruits set up like altarpieces on pedestals, way too many types of berries and
only one kind of banana. The
avocados here are tiny; the apples here are huge.
The top drawer of the dresser in my room is a little
off-sized and gets stuck in the edges when you pull it out or push it in
one-handed; you have to use both hands and push/pull it straight or it will
stick to the side and no amount of one-handed tugging will jar it loose. This has been the case for as long as
I’ve had this dresser, which predates my own existence and for all I know was
in my room waiting for me the first time my parents brought me home from the
hospital, and yet somehow, miraculously, I forgot that the drawer sticks. It took me about four tries of opening
it one-handed to realize that the drawer requires both hands and my complete
attention and is too proud to be opened one-handed and carelessly while I’m
getting dressed in the morning; it took me another seven tries to remember that
this has always been the case.
Somehow the muscle memory of always-opening-this-drawer-with-both-hands-no-matter-what
had gotten lost, forgotten somewhere.
Coming home has been a long list of remembering things I
have forgotten. Opening drawers
and boxes that I packed in 2010 and thinking “oh, yeah, I remember that bowl”
or “oh, so that’s where that umbrella went” or “hey, since when do I own so
many winter hats?” Going out to
dinner with my family and hearing names dropped and having to stop the
conversation to go “wait, which work friend is this?” or “wait, have I met this
person?” or “when did that happen?”
It’s not just stories I’ve missed being gone; it’s people and places and
events I’ve forgotten, how old someone’s son was when I left or where someone’s
boyfriend is from, where the movie theater is or which exit I should take to
get downtown.
This past week some relatives of mine had a pre-thanksgiving
thanksgiving meal, since we would not be together for the actual holiday. I was bombarded with questions, as was
to be expected, because this is what happens when you return from living in a
mudhut in Africa, people want to know what it was like, they want to know what
you did, what you saw, what it felt like to sit in a mudhut during a rainstorm.
Peace Corps actually provides a
few sessions toward the end of your service (in between bouts of end-of-service
paperwork) about readjusting to life in America, about the disorientation of
returning to a life that doesn’t quite fit the same way anymore, about freaking
out a little every time you see how many types of milk there are at a grocery
store, about the strange and sometimes awesome and often repetitive questions
people would ask (like, “do they speak African there?”), and about the
surprising number of people who actually wouldn’t be all that interested.
I have been very lucky; I have plenty of family and friends
who are genuinely interested in what I’ve been through these past few
years. And when they asked me
specific questions—how long were you there, where did you go to the bathroom,
were there spiders or snakes?—I was happy to answer, to ramble for as long as
was socially appropriate about black mambas and pit latrines and the time my
cat tried to take on a tarantula.
I had no trouble bringing up these memories when prompted.
But some of the questions—the general questions, which of
course were the most common questions, because who knows what to ask someone
who’s been in the Peace Corps for three years? How can someone be expected to know where to start?—some of
those more general questions left me stumped, left me tongue-tied and a little
bit panicked, because in those moments I would get a chill up my back and
think: I don’t remember.
Memory is a funny thing. It doesn’t always work the way you expect it to, and it
isn’t some well-organized filing cabinet you can open at whim and comb through
by file name or category. Things
get lost in there, things burst forth into your consciousness unexpectedly and
without reason, and the strangest moments can bring back a memory you didn’t
even remember you’d forgotten. As
I understand it, our brain stores memories in synapses connected by electric
currents, and those currents wear down over time until the memory gets isolated
and abandoned, so that the memory is still there but unreachable, which is why
sometimes you can’t remember something no matter how hard you focus on it, and
then if you think about something else for awhile the memory will come to
you—your brain is finding a new way to the memory, because the old path is in
disrepair. You might know vaguely
your destination, but when you don’t care for the roads, don’t watch them or
tend to them regularly, they become potholed and tree-fallen and steadily more
difficult to drive on.
So it’s not that I don’t remember what Zambia was like, the
taste and texture of nshima or the angle of the sun over my kitchen hut in the
morning—it’s just that those memories are becoming more and more unused the
further away they get, and like the forgotten dresser drawer the less I think
about it the more likely I am to forget it entirely. When specifically prompted, I can describe the bamboo mat on
my kitchen floor, the folds of the mosquito net over my bed, the patterns on my
hand-sewn couch cushions, the black spots on my cat, because those memories are
still there, but since I’m not accessing them regularly I forget the way back
there, forget to even try. Sitting
around the table this weekend fielding questions from earnest and interested
family members, I was thrown by the number of questions I had to struggle to
answer, the memory muscles I hadn’t stretched lately.
I am lucky that I kept a daily journal for the majority of
my years abroad—that I wrote down what training was like, what my community was
like, anecdotes about chameleons and falls from my bike, the day the cat stole
my dinner while an inebriated neighbor was distracting me, the peanut butter
and honey sandwich I ate that first night by candlelight. We think when we’re living something
that we’ll remember it; that if it is important it will stick, or as my mother
used to say, “if you can’t remember it then it can’t have been all that
important.”
And maybe some of it isn’t that important, like that skirt,
some remnant of someone I thought I was going to be, which is now sitting in a
bag ready to be donated and forgotten once again. But there are other things I want to write down because I know
I will forget them, like a little girl’s smile or the early lettuce shoots in
my garden or the way snow sweet-crunches underfoot. Because the next day, like today, the weather may change,
the rain may pour and the snow may wash away as if it were never there in the
first place.
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