Flower Girls, Space Heaters & the Apple of Desire...

Leah & Shaks are sitting in front of the gas space heater, while Ez has his own heater as he lays in bed downstairs on his iBook. Josh is out for dinner w/ his buddies on the last night their favorite teacher from last year, Chip Faircloth, is in town. It's a slow Monday night here in Kathmandu...

Winter in Nepal leaves a lingering chill in the air here on the southern slopes of the Himalaya. We're at 5,000+' with magnificent sun from the early morning, but there is a dry breeze in the evening coming off the 25,000' mountains only ten or twenty miles to the north. Of course, our home was really designed for the tropics of Bali, not the Himalaya. We have eight sets of sliding glass doors downstairs, plus a couple of normal swinging doors, as well. Purrrfect for ten months of the year here, when the low hanging sun on the horizon rises high & long enough to warm the inside of the home. But during the "darkest day of the year" (as Frost wrote of New England...), the single digit centigrade temperatures pour in through the cracks in the handmade wooden window frames and coat the thin, ice-like glass that shelters us from the black skies outside.

I remember the first time I met a 'space heater' at a friend of Alma's off Greenwich Green when Scott & I landed in London the first week of March 1978. After decades of natural gas flowing unnoticed through our homes in America, warming the insides of our houses while snow piled high outside, it was a bit of a shock to realize that not all of the world had the easy comforts of our American middle class world.

Now, decades after having made my home in Kathmandu, when early December arrives, these handsome Italian heaters come out of the closets to protect us from these dark nights & hot water bottles warm our beds before we slip in to sleep. Such are the minor changes and adjustments one almost forgets to notice after so many years away...

Yet, like you, night follows day, and sleep calls after a busy and fulfilling day. The doors on my work on the other side of town are closed, the office lights off. Now, as Leah lying on the floor finishes her last drawing of a flower girl (with a colorful wreath of flowers around her head), the BBC news on in the background, the low rumble of the gas heater churning out warmth, I finish my ruminations and head to our bedroom. Leah will pick out a few books to read before she sleeps. I'll take my "Botany of Desire" to dream of apples and, perchance, a gentler myth of love...