A week and a half ago, Nikola helped me plant the sage, parsley, and rosemary seeds from packets I brought from home after my Christmas vacation. I placed them strategically in sunny places around my apartment, and I am happy to report that the sage is already growing! Two tiny little green nubs are also showing on the rosemary side of the rectangular planter, ahead of schedule. It will still be a couple of more weeks before I see any of my parsley sprouting. The day before yesterday was such a sunny, warm and beautiful day that I put all the herbs on the balcony for the duration of the afternoon; I was sure that it wouldn't rain and flood them all. When I came home from work, to my delight, I saw a bunch of little green things happening with my sage! I immediately sent a text message to Nikola's mobile: THE SEEDS ARE GROWING!
Nikola had also let me snap off a piece of one of his cactus plants in April. (I remember when I was a child I did this with my dad and my brother, and we had something of a race to see whose would grow the fastest.) I put it in a glass of water on my kitchen windowsill and by the time I returned to Pehcevo from my nearly 3 weeks in Washington D.C. it had put down four roots and was more than ready to be planted. So we did that too, and it is growing quite well. I swear it's grown a full inch in the last week. I still have some more parsley seeds and I think I am going to get one more bucket and use the little bit of leftover soil that I have to grow another pot of it. I will use plenty of it, especially in summer soups and salads. My next plan is to fill my apartment with plants and flowers. I think every week I am going to add something. It is actually extremely pathetic that after the 15 months that I have lived in this apartment that I still have nothing living at all in the apartment, other than myself of course! I always think that I want to have flowers and plants all over the place but I have not started doing anything about it until recently. Nikola promised me that this summer, I would have the most beautiful balcony in Pehcevo.
On Tuesday I went in the morning to help the director of the post office with some forms she had received in English that she wasn't quite sure how to respond to. I am always happy to do anything for her on short notice because she is such an especially sweet and lively character. I have never seen someone laugh so much. She calls me names like "Crce" and "Dushitza" (sweetheart and little spirit). Sometimes when mail arrives in my post office box she even calls me directly upstairs at my apartment and orders me to come down. She had showed me the documents in passing last month, but I think it was the day before I was about to leave for Washington D.C. so I wasn't able to help her at that time. Not that she was in a hurry; she told me she planned to deal with the forms within a couple of months. (!) She smiled at me, cocking her head from side to side, reciting, "Imam vreme, imam vreme". (I have time, I have time.)
It turns out that last fall five packages were sent to someone in this town and apparently never arrived. The sender lives in San Leandro, California, which is very ironic because I grew up there in a sense, spending summers and holidays with my dad there from the time I was 8 years old until he sold the house when I was fifteen. The Washington Manor post office (only a couple of blocks from our old house) had sent 5 different inquiry forms, listing the contents of each package and so forth, but since the sender never insured or registered the packages there was no way for the Macedonian post to track them down. When I saw the location of the post office where the documents originated, my mouth dropped open in surprise! I reviewed the documents and ended up composing a handwritten letter to the Office of International Claims and Inquiries of the United States Postal Service in New York City! I explained the whole situation to them in writing, explained who I was and why I was the one writing (I do NOT work at the post office), and gave contact information in case they had further questions.
Of course the director of the post office was very grateful to me because this wasn't something that she could do herself, being that she doesn't speak, read or write a word of English. When I had walked in that morning she was by herself, and she immediately observed that I was wearing a light sweater, long skirt and platform sandals. (She on the other hand, was wearing dress slacks, a blouse, jacket, scarf, nylons and high-heeled shoes.) She took me by the arm and put me into a chair next to a heater that was radiating hot air, chastising me that I "would freeze myself". She gave me the documents, a blank half-piece of paper and a pen. She then told me to wait, and started pulling out bundled-up sheaths and packages of yellow and crumbly paper, that at first glance appeared very old and then I realized they were just records of packages received at the post office last fall. She struggled to untie the knotted strings holding all the documents together and explained that she was looking for some document numbers, but I told her not to worry about it, that I had everything I needed to write the letter. Nevertheless she proceeded to pull out more and more bundles, insisting she had something else to tell me, loosening all different kinds of forms, upside-down and backwards, and tried to put some semblance of order to the whole mess but in the end, just threw them back underneath the post office boxes in a wooden cubicle, with tons of other papers, loose strings and debris. She finally laughed and gestured towards me as if to say, What can ya do? It doesn't matter anyway - go ahead with the letter!
During this whole procedure she was laughing and in good spirits, even though the phone continued to ring continuously and she was the only one there to answer it. I sat nearby at a long table against the side wall, underneath a shelf containing old green metal boxes, one for the mail of each firm in the town, the radiator toasting my bare leg and foot (which were just fine even before she intervened on my behalf). She talked loudly on the phone, standing with one hip jutted out, smoking a cigarette and letting the ash grow so long I feared it would flutter down to the floor. Behind me were mismatched area rugs on the tile floor, metal desks with relatively new computers and dot matrix-type printers, and stacks and stacks of papers and files. Every available surface was covered, and inside desks with no drawers more documents were shoved inside. Next to my leg which wasn't getting radiated were boxes and packages tied with dingy string that arrived and had been stacked up, waiting for someone to come and get them. A bunch of plants huddled in the light by the big front window and the air was heavy with stale cigarette smoke. Occasionally as I wrote someone would shuffle in, mail something, or just say hello. Finally the director's son came in, and a long conversation ensued, resulting in the director looking for her personal identification card. I stopped what I was doing and watched over my shoulder as she retrieved her purse, and began removing an unbelievable amount of all types of things from inside, the whole time asking, "Where is my ID? Where is it? Is it at home with my passport? I have no idea!"
Of course she continued to smile and laugh; she even asked me if I had seen her ID. She picked up the phone and made several calls, I assumed from what little I understood (she was rapidly speaking in the local dialect rather than the national proper literature of the language) that the purpose of each call to various relatives was to discover the mysterious location of her vanished ID. From the rest of the conversations (she never was able to find it) that someone (her son?) needed to obtain some kind of document or something, and that he needed several things to be able to do so. It wasn't really my business, but it was just so amusing to watch her. She shouted at me, "To obtain one document you need to produce thirty more! Ridiculous!" I wouldn't mind just taking a video camera and filming an hour of her activity just to entertain myself. She is truly one of those people who doesn't seem to let anything bother her. No matter what is going on around her, or how ridiculous it seems to be, she handles it by rolling with the punches; smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, waving her hands around and laughing. When I finally addressed the envelope, I walked out of there with a big smile on my face, and only half of it was satisfaction from helping someone out.