Winding Down

By Rachel

This week marks the last week that Charlie and I will be alone in our apartment. With the arrival of our college friends Rob and Gabe on May 7, The Visiting will officially begin. We are very excited to see everyone who is coming and go on our various adventures with them. The arrival of The Friends has long been our mental marker for the beginning of the end. Whew!

But it also means that the way we spent much of this year is over. Next week will be my last week teaching at the Children’s Palace and my last week of Mongolian lessons. We’ll get out of our rhythm of trips to the store, water deliveries, inviting friends for dinner, Sunday hikes. This is good and bad, of course. Some of those things are annoying and others are very nice.

What I will miss most of all is having so much time. Time to read. Time to begin an afternoon with a pumpkin and finish with a pumpkin pie. Time to walk most places I go. Time to keep up with the Ask Carolyn on-line chats.

But mostly, having so much time together with Charlie. I can think of two nights when we haven’t eaten dinner together. Neither of us has work to stress us out (at least in the same way it does at home.) We haven’t had hobbies or many friends independent of each other. We have time to go to the gym together, cook together most nights and sit around in the evenings. It has been great, and I know it won’t ever really be like this again.

In some ways this is good; we each need our friends and jobs and hobbies. We need our separate experiences. We need our American lives, because this life would make us crazy eventually. But even with all the frustrations, lack of meaningful work, ugliness, homesickness, etcetera, this has been a wonderful pause in that American life.

Of course, May 7 is not the end of our time in Mongolia, but things will change. This eight months of Special Time will become something else, probably wonderful, but different.