Time

Back home the Katydids are sounding. They go all night long, from dusk to dawn. On a hot night in August they can be so loud. Katydidit. Katydidit. Katydidit. It's a loveley rackett. As the nights get cooler they slack off to a simple "katy". Getting fewer by the night. Folks who've never been to the Appalachian Chain don't know the sound. If you are ever there in the late summer, listen and keep it in your heart.
I'm not in Appalachia though. I'm in Iraq on the Mesopatamian Plain. You don't hear singing insects here at night. The nights are still with the occasional sound of distant explosions. Some a little closer than the others. You hear it and then you learn what happened the next day. Sometimes. One morning a loud explosion woke everyone early. It woke people clear across Taji. Nobody's figured out where the thing hit. Luck, I don't know. It's been a while back.

The last few mornings have been cooler. My Interprators tell me that the rain is coming soon. They say it with a releiving smile. But, the rain brings mud. The ground here is clay, a grey powdery clay. Wind picks it up and carries it threw the air. Water sits on it though. Every "public" building has a mud scraper near the door. Everywhere you look you can see where trucks have made ruts in the muddy earth. Trucks spray the road with water to keep the dust down, for 15 minutes the mud slings onto vehicles and stays there. It's like glue.

Concrete is inferior here. It's not mixed with sand, but the dry clay dust. There are warehouses all over Taji that we bombed during the first war. Some may have been poorly built, but their falling down. I've seen where corigated card board was stuffed into supporting concrete beams as a filler of sorts. Where all of this is so poor to western standards, to the Arabs, it's not as much of a problem. I suspect it's partly due to their vision of time. If it's good today, then it's good enough. There is only today. Tommorow may never come. Inshalla...If God wills it. The Desert is an unforgiving place and I can see it evolve from there.
Meanwhile in the west we build houses to outlast us by many years. Like a monument to ourselves. As if we never see our society failing. We plan forward and sometimes that morphs into our perceived imortality. Being here and turning things over in my mind reinforces the notion of making the best of the day you have...while not losing sight of tommorow.
Time is a tool and time is a weapon. It's always in short supply and high in demand. Time is a space to be occupied, used, cherished, honored and gaurded. Time goes on forever and we can't get enough of it.

En Avant, En Avant...Viva le Appalachia
The Appalachianist