Rainy days

Lately we’ve been getting regular afternoon thunderstorms. I am writing from a pool of golden lamplight in my living room with the outside world hazed by rain. Falling straight down, the rain seems in such a rush. It behaves differently here than on the prairies, as if the subtropical heat were a kind of gravity. I love the sound of raindrops hitting the window, the awning underneath it, the leaves of the trees beyond; I love the way it streaks the world, quiets its colours, sends up sheets of mist like fog that float between the tall buildings just south of us. These storms are not quite daily, although we are entering a rainy season and they might be soon. For now, I find them a really wonderful reminder to take a break in the middle of the day if I need it. The sky darkens suddenly, and I have to decide whether to turn on the lights.

I spent this past week at the foot of Huangshan Mountain in Anhui province. D’s mom is here visiting, giving me space to take a bit of a break. I wrote and read and did school work in my hotel room in between visits to the scenic areas that are some of the most famous in China. I have to imagine that the most famous tree in China is one of the most famous trees in the world, period, but I guess there aren’t that many individual trees that make it to that list.

The mountain itself is incredibly beautiful, and even though it was very busy and not the kind of hiking I’m used to doing, it felt like a privilege to sit and watch clouds move through those valleys. On one of my bus rides up to the entrance to the mountain, I saw a monkey sitting on a guardrail at the roadside. I watched someone wait patiently for the clouds to move on before finishing his ink sketch of the mountain. I sat at a cliff’s edge and wrote; those pages have touched a cloud.

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We got a family pass to our gym this year. They have an indoor and an outdoor pool. The family pass is expensive, but not as expensive as swimming lessons, so this is our solution to getting the kids started on learning to swim. Tomi is rapidly getting comfortable drifting through the deeper water with our support, while Sid is spending most of his time sitting in the shallow water playing with his sharks. It’s a really nice Saturday morning activity, especially while it’s still so hot outside. The pool gets decent shade all morning.

We are taking Chinese lessons now, twice weekly. When I want to say something in Chinese - in Mandarin Chinese, as we call it in English, because there are so many different Chinese languages that I’m sure I do not even have time to learn the names of all of them - I find that I have to clear a space, like brushing eraser dust from a penciled page. I have to open a blank space in my mind and lay the language out, look at it one sound at a time, and then try to speak it aloud. We have barely begun to learn anything: I might be able to ask someone for the time, or tell them when I will go to Beijing (I have no plans to go to Beijing). I can tell them that I am Canadian. I can tell them what time I wake up at. Just those phrases require so much space. I wonder if this feeling of needing to clear myself before speaking will stay as I learn more, or if eventually I will find that the language has grown in with my own.

Finally, I’ve started classes. As may already be obvious, I won’t be posting very often, but I’ll aim to post once monthly. If there’s anything that you’re interested in hearing about what it’s like to live in China, let me know and I’ll see if I can bring together something worth reading.