Michele Womble: Blog

We have been in America now for a week and a half.  What with packing and traveling and then adjusting to the time difference and recovering from jetlag, I’ve kind of dropped off the radar for several weeks.  They say it takes a day to recover for every hour in the time difference, so I guess tomorrow we should be starting to feel more or less normal, as it will have been 11 days since we arrived.
Traveling from Russia to America and from America to Russia is not just physically difficult, but emotionally difficult as well.  On the one hand we are excited to see the land and people that we have been apart from – but at the same time it means separation from the ones that we are with currently.  Our “hello’s are always preceded by “goodbye’s”.  It is like we are part of two completely different worlds, both of which we love, both of which seem to preclude the other.
We had two 4-hour flights on Saturday the 5th through Moscow [...]

The worship band I'm part of was invited to do a mini-concert in a nearby city, Leninsk-Kuznetskii.  (Leninsk, for short.)  We didn't have enough room in the car for all the band members, so we decided that one of the girls would ride down that morning with another group of folks from our church who were also going, and she would ride back on the return trip with the rest of our band while I would stay the night in Leninsk and come back the next morning on the train.  Our church had rented a four room apartment in Leninsk for the week for people to stay in as they came and went for various outreach activities, and we thought I would stay there Saturday night (along with 13 other people).  (Just so you know, making a road trip is a little different than in America, the roads aren't quite as good.)
The trip down was fairly uneventful except for getting pulled over for passing in a no passing zone, which was kind of odd because we were car number 3 in a line of 3 cars (all [...]

The last week has been really nice.  As the kids put it, it feels so good not to have to wear a hat.  Although a few are still wearing hats of some sort, we have abandoned ours.  For now, hatless does feel rather free.  It also feels really free to be able to throw on your jacket and shoes and run out the door.  It no longer takes ten minutes or so to get dressed to go out.  I can't say it's been warm, exactly (we're still in light jackets), but then warm can be a somewhat relative term, and it certainly has been a lot warmer this week than it's been in a long time.
The Box Elders (or "Ash-leaf maples") have all flowered - they look like they are covered all over with light green lace.  They will leaf later - but if you don't look closely it LOOKS like they have small pale leaves.  I've never considered them to be very pretty trees (especially compared to other maples), but that may not be fair to them, it could be that city life just doesn't agree [...]

Yesterday they turned off the heat.  Central heat means something a little different here than it does in America.  It means that somewhere "they" turn it on and off according to a certain schedule. Off the end of April, early May, and on the end of September.  They only way for you to regulate it yourself is to open a window if you get too hot.  And if you're too cold...(shrug) - go buy an electric heater.
Be that as it may, yesterday they turned off the heat.  Yesterday morning,  there were little buds on the tree outside my window that by evening had already begun to open up.  It looks like the trees might just have some early leaves by May 1.  Yesterday I took a walk in the park, and while many people were still in jackets, some had thrown off their jackets and were dressed for summer.  It's a bit incongruous to see someone in shorts and a short sleeve shirt ambling by a large mound of dirty snow.   Yesterday there were little patches [...]

I was getting ready for bed when I heard a steady tapping against the window - familiar sound, but one that we haven't heard in 5 or 6 months.  It took a few minutes for me to realize what it was - and a few more minutes still to BELIEVE that it was, indeed, raining.  Rain - which means that winter is giving way at last.  I opened all the windows so that we could listen to it as we slept.  I hope that it would wash the snow away.
When we woke the next morning it was a bit - nippy.  I looked out the window and found that our rain had turned to snow.  It went back and forth between snow and rain for a bit, but the snow won out. The rain had washed a little bit of the old snow away, but there's still a whole lot left to be "dealt with".   Still, rain...that means the cold and snow can't hold out too much longer.
I didn't want the new snow.  But I did have to grudgingly admit that it was pretty.  As I sat on my bed looking out the window at the gray [...]