Selçuk and Sherbet [Turkey, pt. 3]

From Bursa, we drove all the way to the sea. Selçuk is a tourist town, it seems. We stopped at a promising little inn. Pulling the huge van into the strip of gravel that served as a parking lot, we filed out past a hedge of towering oleader bushes. I thought of Hawaii, and my father's childhood; of highway medians in California, full of the same pink and white blossoms and tongue-shaped green leaves.

The garden of the inn, as seen from my window

Down a little winding brick path past an old lady on a bench holding a hand-woven something-or-other, into a cool dark room with a glass cooler full of a liquid the color of hibiscus. An English speaking couple was on their way out the door. The parents spoke to the man at the counter; my sister S. and I sampled the small scones on a plate by the cooler. They were buttery and tasted of cheese and herbs.

The initial discussion over, we were released to wait in the garden. O.'s mother drew some of the red liquid into goblets for us. "It is sherbet," she told us. "Something sweet and cool." Punch, I thought, and took a sip.

It was not punch. At least, it was not a fruit punch. Everyone was taken aback by the intensity of the flavor. It tasted of cinnamon and... something else, something harsher and less sweet. Weeks later, we looked up the translation of the Turkish word. Cloves. This was essentially a clove tea, beautiful to look at, especially in the crystal glasses it was served in, but too strong for me to enjoy, like drinking incense.

After a few minutes, we were given keys and led through a garden of roses and luxurious greenery to our rooms. Later, S. and I were to discover tortoises roaming through the roses, confident enough in their shells to defend their territory against us interloping humans. One of them bit my toe when I blocked his way. They were oddly self-conscious though, and would stop munching on weeds when they noticed us staring at them.

S. with tortoise

Once upon a time, and far, far away [Turkey, pt. 2]

Once upon a time, it was summer, and sunny.

We traveled, O. and I and my parents and his parents and my sister, to a far away land: Turkey. The first night, we lost my parents very temporarily, and I yelled at O.'s father. The second night, we prepared to leave Istanbul. The second morning, we rose at dawn and piled suitcase upon suitcase into two taxis, dividing the Turks between the two cars so that no one would get cheated. The taxis swerved through cobble-stone alleys and across lane-markers, and deposited us, slightly out of breath, at the ferry terminal on the Sea of Marmora. Confused and staggering under our luggage and passports, we found our way onto the ferry that would take us to another continent in a short hour.

On the ferry, we ate cake and sesame-encrusted simit, and O. drank whole milk from an aseptic carton. I stole sips from his paper cup. It was warm and creamy. A weather forecaster on TV chattered on, and I tried in vain to decode her incantations.

Once docked in Bursa, we deboarded in chaos, some squeezing into an elevator. I refused and sought the stairs, suitcase in hand. My sister followed, and my father. On land our party of seven was reunited to stand, looking lost, in the shade of the bus terminal, awaiting a van that would take us into the city.

The van came, and its driver arranged our bags like Jenga blocks in the back. Some roads were closed, there were delays. We wound through the hills and for the first time I saw the Turkish countryside--sun-colored hills rolling away from the road, and olive trees standing in silver rows. It was oddly familiar, evoking California and the south of France, the countryside I stayed in when I was fifteen.

Arriving, after a winding journey, the van pulled up onto the sidewalk in front of an open garage on a busy street: the car rental agency. There the Turks haggled about the insurance portion of the rental contract, and the Americans sat around, bemused and uncomfortable at blocking traffic for so long, and having no idea of the proceedings but noting the increasing loudness of the incomprehensible conversation happening twenty feet away.

Eventually, an agreement was reached and the contract was signed. Having arranged our suitcases in another jigsaw puzzle tower in the rear of the van we were actually renting, we now arranged ourselves inside it, and got on the road in our big black van.

The journey across the Anatolian peninsula began.

* * *

Now it is cloudy, and the leaves are turning red and yellow, and carpeting the sidewalk. We are back in New Jersey, and I am longing for summer (so recently past), for sunshine, for California. O. is talking about quitting his job in a week, and I am thinking: I will never get home to my garden.

But surely this is the start of another journey. Job or not, there will be another road trip across this continent in June. My exile far from the golden state will conclude. In California, even if we can't buy a garden, the hills will be there, rolling and golden, tall grass the color of summer. The oaks will be there. The sea will be there. The sky and the sun will be there, and I will be there with them.

This is a journey, and there will be many arrivals.

Istanbul [Turkey, pt. 1]

We walked by the Bosphorus, looking across the moving water to another continent. The sun was setting, and the heat of mid-morning, when we stood in a serpentine column of tourists waiting to enter the Hagia Sophia, listening to chatter in a dozen languages, and hoping my mother's doomsday forecasts of waiting here for an hour would prove overly pessimistic, and the sun shone directly down on us despite the tall palm trees nearby--that heat was a distant memory.

The water lapped on chunks of broken stone and concrete. The occasional fisherman stood by his rod and line, waiting for movement. On the sidewalk, couples strolled and children skipped. It was my first evening in my husband's country, and my ears strained to catch the few words of Turkish I know. Çok, deniz, çocuk, iyi aksamlar... I held O.'s hand and tried to grasp the fact that I was really here, in this place from my tenth grade geography tests, in the nation O. once worshiped, in his homeland, this place where the continents kiss.

Here, so far from home, but here, with my sister (the person who is most often in my dreams, more often that O. still), my parents (Who more strongly evokes home than the people who made that house, that country, your home?), my husband (who is becoming my home, who is my new home).

It was the beginning of a long trip, and I did not take any photos, because my sister and mother were doing it for me. Now the trip is over and I am sitting in my own home, and I don't have those pictures because home, for the moment, is on the Atlantic side of the country, and not with my parents and their camera on the Pacific.

I mark my places by the seas that nourish them.

That night we walked by the Bosphorus, and thought about crossing the Sea of Marmora the next morning. That night we walked by the strait between the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea. That night the voluptuous moon cast her shining reflection on the water, and S. took pictures, and O. held my hand, and that night was lovely.

Catchup

Dear Reader,

I have been absent from this blog a long time. Many things have transpired:

O. and I had some huge arguments, settled back down, then finally sought out a counselor. My best friend stayed with us for two weeks, commuting into the city to work at a publishing company. I read a book on attachment theory and another on codependence.

I went to Turkey with O., his parents, my parents, and my sister. We swam in the Aegean and the Mediterranean, we touch marble columns and walked under arches in the ruins of Ephesus, we ate meat every day for two weeks. I picked up more Turkish. I met O.'s grandparents and his cousin and her husband and her two small boys, one of whom had chickenpox.

We came back home. My sister stayed with us for ten days. The girl rabbit was discovered to be a boy. O. and I went camping for a weekend. The anniversary of our wedding arrived, and we watched together a rom-com ("The Holiday") that O. had watched to mend his broken heart when I cut off our friendship three and a half years ago, in the days before our worlds meshed.

I started a part-time job for our church; my title is Communications Coordinator. I sent out some emails. Then I came down with chickenpox and we went to the ER.

And now finally here I am, re-acquainting myself with this blog, with the internet, with writing at all. Normally after a long absence from blogging, I just pick up wherever I am and continue my reacting-to-the-moment blogging. This time, I want to actually write about the things that happened in the past couple months. I feel willing, for the first time, to let this blog be more of a story, a comprehensible narrative, and less of a series of fragments. This time I want to bind the fragments together, and let a whole scene come into view.

This post is going to be the itinerary. I have a lot of things to reflect on and I want to do a lot of the reflecting here, at least one post per paragraph. This is the beginning, or a beginning, since life and reflecting on life seem to require beginning again and again. This is another beginning.

And here we go.