Quick Sand

There are certain topics that I feel generally should not be blog fare. Chief among them is food -- do any of you read all those blogs dedicated to tedious descriptions of food preparation ("after my fifth spoon stroke, a nugget of hardened baking soda dispersed" or "at minute 23 in the oven, the top of my banana bread loaf darkened from tawny to toffee")? I am horrified by both the existence of these blogs and also the Betty Crocker perfect photographic documentation. If you read them, I really must know why. Other black-listed themes and items include scanned-in travel itineraries, photographs of flora (unless maybe there's a Jesus-shaped leaf that suggests the Second Coming), and, of course, the weather.

But I will make an exception (being god of the blog) for the monsoons, which are just beginning. I hear that soon the rain will be violent and dramatic, with lightening breaking the sky and heavy clouds bearing down on the verdant landscape. This has not yet happened except in my self-conscious twist of verbiage. But it did rain all day today, Seattle-style, and at 6 pm, despite some drizzle, Griff and I took the dogs for a walk. We'd been outside for about 5 minutes when Griff stepped in a mud puddle next to a highway (think something between Route 1 and I-95) and then promptly sank. He put his other foot down, and soon he was up to his knees in mud and stuck. He leaned over, onto all fours, and tried to dig himself out with cupped hands, but to no avail. For the next fifteen minutes he lurched back and forth until he emerged dripping, like a very messy candle, with several pounds of mud.

Islamabad is not, for the most part, a place where people smile or otherwise express joy very much in public -- the men's faces often look, to my Western eye, serious or guarded or stoic. The experience of being outside transformed, though, as we trudged back to the house, both laughing, and every man who passed us in a car or on a bike or on foot at least grinned. It was somehow really very lovely.