contretemps

love cookie, intact


The southern winds have finally subsided. They kept me in last night, and up the night before; for a time, I dreamed of flying -- while they filled the sky and every available space with a dirty drab fog, dry and thick, not a cloud but a desert, of sand and dust from Africa. They blew all the way to Athens. These winds bring headaches and dysphoria. My lovely Georgian student showed up with her soft pink lipstick caked in black particles. She had to wipe her mouth before the lesson. On her spelling test, she confused all her a’s and e’s.

The winds alone are bad enough, but they coincided this time with a sanitation strike. Stinking, unattended mounds of trash and filth were piling up on every corner; the tourists downtown had to adopt a contortionist’s pose, to angle their cameras away from the blight. The wind picked up, and picked up whatever it could find -- outside the supermarket, a large piece of cardboard sailed up from the sidewalk and slapped an old woman in the face. Everyone tripped along over plastic bottles and bags; they ran, rushed by the wind, blinded by it and wild masses of their own hair.

I’ll sweep my balconies today, shake the dust from my laundry, or re-wash. The streets will take longer; right now, in such a state, it seems they will never be clean. But a little water does wonders. A strike can’t last forever. We move on. We leave the bad behind us.