herbs and spices

The weather was almost British briefly. A strange grey came into all the colours, and, for a few days, skin was cool to the touch. The closeness made us imprudently expectant, and late one night my upward glances were rewarded by a kind of rule-breaking rain, what menstruation literature would call 'spotting'.
Since then its been climbing steadily, 39 degrees and rising. I wouldn’t know what this number means if I read it. It means being woken by the tickle of sweat trickles running down my brow, back, chest. It means looking in a mirror after a gentle cycle into town on a Saturday afternoon and being almost winded in surprise at the red cabbage of a face looking back.

Small seasons there are, constantly of course. Things are born and die, as the Buddhists remind us and as Khmers seem to accept and expect more easily. I get this impression from the way people talk about marriage and childbearing pretty unemotionally, or from the unstirred way people tell stories about their children or parents or husbands having died. It signals to me that there's an edge to my comfortable insulation of do-it-all readysteady healthcare, happy balances of work and rest, vegetables in year-round plasticated availability. Death and seasons are more obvious here, where life's quite a lot more precarious, employment and harvest quick to change, the hormones and fluids and small innocences and sufferings of livestock are everpresent.
So the seasons take different forms here, of course. In January I returned to Kampong Cham in the east and there was a three-day storm of white moth-flies. It was a kind of strange snow, blinding, more of them than air-between it seemed, sticking in the hair and mouth and eyelashes. They turned in the wind like curdled milk in a stirred cup and struck long white spotlights downwind from streetlamps as they struggled for fluorescence.
Chris told a story of a few days in her Devonshire childhood when a plague of ladybirds bombed through town, sharp stinging like pellets on faces, and blew irresistibly to the sea, where they surged in red frothy waves and left red scars of flotsam on the beach-skin.

Seasons are about repeating patterns in new changing circumstance. Mauri the marvel-making, much-loved and many-year-known, came for a month and shared my bed and head and my life here. She is a canny bird indeed and we laughed at ourselves and the world achingly much on a splendidly regular basis. When she left I felt like a warm moneybelt around my waist for months of travel was taken off.

The visit of the Parents Avery was another great transference of homelife familiarity to new conditions. It was pretty weird having their bags in the royal hotel carried upstairs by my friends the staff, or chatting over fried rice with them while getting calls about very cambodian work situations. They were up for everything though (and I got a great feeling driving my mum around on my motorbike, like it was some kind of womb-carriage reversal.. not sure if everyone gets this when they drive their parents..?), and I think got a big kick out of being here. They arrived at a good moment with great big patient ears to let me really shout about all the ways it sometimes feels crap and stupid and, worse, despicable to be here (work-wise i mean, people-wise its been great from the start), and one night I cried dramatically into the lawn of the poshest restaurant in Siem Reap. They reacted great though, my mum by telling me I'm too hard on myself and actually I have lots of skills and gifts that I bring to situations, and my dad by telling me I always crumble and call a crisis on any rare occasion things don't come easily to me, and that I can bloody well get on making a go of it in eight short more months of being here and then spend the rest of my life with my head up my arse if I want to. They're a great combination. It was exactly what I needed, and, whether by their paving some new positive neural pathway or the arrival of THIDA my fabulous new assistant the day after they left, I haven’t really looked back.