22 Months Left!

I celebrated my two month anniversary at site yesterday. I romanced myself with a candlelit dinner of pesto and a glass of wine. The candles provided excellent atmosphere and in no way had anything to do with the fact that it was one of my triweekly blackouts. I had to completely strip my little basil plant of leaves to make one serving, but it was worth it. I can’t wait til my 14 month site anniversary when the leaves have grown back and I can indulge myself with have another pesto dish.

The holiday season is upon us and supermarkets have become a source of great depression for me. Without the buffer of Thanksgiving, Christmas decorations start cluttering grocery store shelves in October. My brain has habituated to the tacky red and green decorations and dismisses the Christmas tree boas as background noise, but the music is a December addition and a particularly salient assault on my senses.

I think of Christmas with the Pops. I think of Track 16, the totally eerie “Walking in the Air” song from the Snowman, that my mom and I love to put on repeat as my brother wails that something so terrifying has no place in Christmas tradition. I think of Willie Nelson, which, as a rule, resurfaces at all family functions to the accompaniment of my father’s (unfortunate) butt dance. I think of the Tran-Siberian Orchestra and that one folky song about the little boy in the bar – my mom likes to stop to listen to the words of the song. I am not too fond of the selection of holiday music available here and sadly my iPod died a while ago so I can’t supply my own.

This is my first Christmas away from my family. My strategy for coping (because the Peace Corps is all about ‘strategies for coping’) has been pretending that it isn’t happening…like I’ve fallen into some vortex where time stretches for me but when I pop out – boom, it will be Christmas, it will be Halloween, my family and friend’s birthdays, graduations, wedding parties. It will be everything I’ve missed and am missing. This is a decidedly poor method of coping. Because every time I buy my groceries I’m reminded of where I’m not.