Being Green

A friend who has also been away from Dushanbe for at least a few weeks returned this week and commented at how green the city is. I noticed it right away, too -- apparently it rained for practically the whole two weeks we were away.

This meant that, first of all, that there was no need for me to lie awake at night wondering what the swift change in weather in the two weeks before we left, from modestly chilly to downright hot, and possibly a continuing rise in temperature might mean for our little garden, left without anyone to water it while we were gone. We came back to a bushy garden full of all kinds of plants that I haven't even had a chance (because of the continuing rain) to parse out and edit. Among them are definitely a profusion of mint, what looks like maybe some carrot greens, definitely some light green lettuces, and a bunch of flourishing beet greens. And our rose bushes look very fine.

The rain also means that truly the hills surrounding Dushanbe really are a beautiful shade of green, which was especially striking to me, I think, because of where we'd been most recently.

We spent about a week in "La Ville Rouge," Marrakech, which really is quite ruddy red -- mainly I suppose it's the architecture and the old medina walls, but the overall sensation is definitely Red. Of course, I haven't yet uploaded all our photos, and anyway I didn't take anything so beautiful or illustrative of the red as this:


Then we hopped our plane from Casablanca to Istanbul, where everything is more grey-blue. Again, not my photo, but it easily could have been:


And now we're back and find ourselves in a curiously green environment. And, yet again, since I haven't yet gotten a snapshot of it, I will refer to Flickr for illustration. Even though this is outside Dushanbe, it gives a good sense of what those hills look like right now, and what I see every time I look out our upstairs window at the hills on the city's northwest edge: