Back for round two…

Late this spring, when I realized that summer was coming, and remembered what summer was like last year, I tried to make sure I scheduled enough activities so that I would not be bored. And I was not. In June I worked in Kiev for a week and went to Khmelnytsky/Kamyanets-Podylsky/the Carpathians for a week. In July I went to Prague and then to Odessa. Most of August I was in Sudak, working at a camp.

Perhaps it was a build-up of all of these activities, perhaps it was the fact that while I was in Sudak not only did I run into technical difficulties and never had a day off (three weeks solid with teenagers all day every day) but about five days ago, I said “Хватит” (enough) and scheduled an early return home (three days early). Turns out it was just in time, because all I want to do now is sleep. Sudak was beautiful, but between the kids running all day and not sleeping until late into the night, and the noise from the quay, I did not sleep enough. At all. For three weeks.

On the train ride home from Sudak

One does not realize the effect that exhaustion has – sometimes it is immediate, sometimes it creeps up on you until one day you realize you are not quite as patient as you would otherwise be, and that you are reacting in ways you may otherwise not react to situations that may be difficult but not impossible. In other words, it gets hard to deal with the things that life throws at you, especially when life seems to be laughing at you and throwing you a whole lot to deal with all at once.

So here I am, back in my city of residence after being away from it for most of the summer, and in many ways feeling like I am starting from scratch. It is time to re-establish contact with people I have not heard from all summer (they like to take time off too!) and get back to work at the library and university. And I have a lot of work to do, as I need to recover a great deal of material that I lost last month. I think it is going to be a busy fall.

And this morning, all I wanted to do was stay in bed.

I believe I will soon get my energy back. It helps that the weather is already cooling down. I love warm weather – certainly I love it more than I like winter (which is to say, I do not like winter at all). While I was in Sudak, I noticed that some of the leaves were already changing color and falling off the trees. In other parts of Ukraine, it seems that summer never arrived. Certainly it was nowhere near as hot as it was last year, anywhere in the country. Oh, there were a few hot days here and there but not the constant heat that we experienced last July and early August. Fall arrives quickly here. As I remember, at the beginning of September I was already breaking out my long sleeves. And though I have my window open at night still, it is not wide open, and I have a light blanket on my bed.

I am also grateful to have made a couple of new friends in Sudak. While I was on the train on the way there, I was in a coupe, and met a couple who boarded the train at the same station, and were also going to Sudak (the train stopped in Simferopol). It so happens that they were also from Kirovograd, and they stayed in the building that was next to mine (which happened to be quieter and nicer, I ultimately discovered – they had their own bathroom and shower and again, quiet).

When I decided to leave early, they went with me to exchange my ticket and as it turned out, not only did I get a ticket on the same train back to Znamenka but in the same car as they were, and ultimately I stayed in their coupe with them because no one else boarded and joined them. It gets better though…we arrived in Znamenka at 3 a.m. and they have a car, so I did not have to wait until the buses started to run to get back to Kirovograd – I got a ride from them!

Oh, the little things…