Second summer in Tajikistan, with tortoises

Still in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

Claudia and the kids are in Germany for the summer, because it's cool and green there, and the kids have friends and the grandparents are there.  I have to work, so I stay.  

This is the second summer in Tajikistan, and that's interesting right there because it's been a while since I've had two summers in one place.  Summer 2011 was Moldova, summer 2012 was Germany, 2013 was Kosovo, 2014 was Germany again.  Put another way: we've moved five times in five years:  to Moldova, back to Germany, to Kosovo, back to Germany, and to Tajikistan last year. 

Anyway.  I'm alone in the house, except for the tortoises.  These are two Russian tortoises:  Jebediah, who is large and lives in the garden, and Franklin, who is small and lives in a box in the kitchen.  (Because we worry about crows or cats. So Franklin will stay in the box until he grows a bit bigger.)

Jebediah was David's 12th birthday present.  (David is a kid who has yearned for a pet for a long time, so he was pretty happy.)  I literally got him from a guy who knew a guy, and he was handed to me in a brown paper bag.  He's not very social.  Pretty cool to watch when he decides to patrol around the garden, though.  Little Franklin was inherited from a little boy who left Tajikistan; formally he belongs to everyone, but only David and Jacob give him much attention.

 

Franklin needs exercise and sunshine, poor little guy. So every day or so, I take him out and let him run around in the garden for a while. Okay, walk very slowly around in the garden for a while.  Slight complicating factor: a small Russian tortoise can disappear like a goddamn ninja. Seriously.  He's mostly brown with some black, some gray and some green -- precisely the color of his environment -- and for a thing with a tiny brain, he's incredibly competent at slipping around behind a tree or into the hollow at the base of a tuft of grass or something, and then going utterly motionless and just blending.  So I can't just put him down and come back a while later. If I want to walk him, I actually have to sit there (okay, with a book or a laptop) and keep one eye on him.  The boys would lie in the hammock, but I sit in a chair, occasionally moving it around to keep a close eye.

 

-- So the garden.  The house is very large, six bedrooms, and it's half wrapped around a small garden.  Very typical Tajik design, and it makes sense given the climate -- summers are long and hot.  There are roses, some small trees (several apricots and a persimmon), and a grape vine.  We brought the trampoline and the hammock, and there's just barely room for both of them.  On the minus side, the soil here is not good -- once bare, it turns to hard-packed clay, and then it's damnably hard to get anything ever to grow again.  (If I were sure we'd be here for another year, I'd put some sod down.)  We had a rabbit for a while -- another inheritance -- but he was eating the garden bare, and I didn't want the kids getting too attached (moving six people around the world is hard enough), so after they left for the summer I passed him along to another expat, an Embassy employee with a bigger garden.   

The kids didn't get attached; they don't ask about the rabbit.  They check in on the tortoises, though.

 

Otherwise... it's quiet.  Most days are very hot, 95 or 100 or more, and sunny and dry and a bit dusty.  I more or less live weekend to weekend.  I'm reading a lot more books.  Wednesday nights are Pub Quiz.  Saturday afternoon is the Hash.  I try to water the garden at least once a day.

 

It's summer in Central Asia, and I'm alone in the house.