Everybody is whispering. The rumor on the base is that there is going to be some big announcement after the November election and that "the contractors will be asked to start winding down". Mark says this is above his level. Linda's husband says the same. The guard Marat looks at me a little differently, or I imagine it.
We still have the garage full of Lily's birthday paper lanterns. I don't know what to do with them.
We started the new school year. Sam is in fifth grade, Lily in third. Chynara's Iradi lessons are now on Wednesdays and the kids insist on going too. Lily can read a few signs. Sam can order tea in two languages and count to a hundred.
The homeschool group lost two families to the new rotation; the rest of us wave at each other more than usual.
The St. Tomas parish took a bus to Iyık Janyl for the Feast of St. Janyl (24 August), with the pilgrims. It took the whole day to get there, in a bus with no air conditioning and forty people singing. The Church of St. Janyl is on a hill. The line to touch the doors went down the whole hill, and an old Iradi woman beside me kept pressing a handful of candy into Lily's hand.
Inside it's nothing like our churches. A dome, no pews, no statues, and a screen made of carved walnut in front of the altar. The chant was strange and beautiful and I understood none of it. I stood in the back with my eyes shut. I think that's how it is meant to be listened to.
August in Talas means melons. The bazaar road looks like a sea of green and yellow: big striped ones, long yellow ones, small round ones that smell like honey. Rahim ata gave me a heavy one (3 som) and showed me how to tap it: "if it sounds like a drum, no good; if it sounds like a closed door, good."
I tapped fifteen melons before I picked one. I'm told that this is normal.
The base fireworks were cancelled this year ("sensitivities", says Linda), so we had a cookout on the Cottonwood green with sparklers instead. Burgers, a flag on the fence, and the guard's kids waving little flags that Lily had made from napkins and toothpicks. Mirbek brought a big pot of shashlik, which beat our burgers by a mile.
The mountains had a thunderstorm after dark and that was our fireworks.