Welcome to New Yurt

If you’d prefer to listen to this week’s newsletter, you can find The Fig podcast here.

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Dear Friends,

July fourth has never been my favorite holiday. It’s hot. Ostentatious patriotism has always given me the ick. My family is not “lake people,” and braving the crowds at a beach on a major holiday is also not my jam. Did I mention it’s really, really hot?

When Jake joined the Foreign Service, Independence Day crashed even further down the rankings, because in the State Department, July 4^th means working a major representational reception. And though this year I didn’t have a role in the “IDR” (Independence Day Reception, because what is life without extraneous acronyms), as the CLO I’m in charge of throwing the smaller party for the community.

We’re still under a hiring freeze, so I’m still the only CLO in the office. And with the budget growing tighter this year, there’s no overtime allotted for my admin assistant to work on a holiday (not that I’d want her to—she’s at the lake this week with her family on a well-deserved vacation).

So there’s me and the Ambassador’s wife headless-chickening over broken pool tiles, late Amazon orders (Iran activity paused our mail through Qatar for a week, understandably), trying to get ahold of the lifeguard, who isn’t texting back. The freezer with all the popsicles in it died, and they all melted—I don’t know, man. It was a great party. Nora spent five straight hours in a wading pool giggling with her friends. There were hot dogs. The kids annihilated the craft table. The life guard fixed her broken phone and showed up early and kept the Marines and the eight-year-olds from drowning each other.

I might even have regained a little love for America after hearing a colleague muse that he didn’t think we should let those bent on cruelty decide what it means to be patriotic.

So that was the fourth.

And then, because I can’t leave well enough alone, I scheduled a community overnight yurt camping trip for July 5^th and 6^th. This was also coming after a week of Jake being away or working late every night running cultural programming for a visiting military band.

And the weekend, too, was great. The yurt camp exceeded expectations. All of the yurts were named after cities. We stayed in “London,” but the yurt next to ours was “New York,” which I couldn’t get over for passé Taylor Swift reasons. Welcome to New Yurt. It’s been waiting for you.

Everyone got to swim in lake Issyk-Kul, and no one injured themselves on the slippery lake rocks. The children were all dead silent on the 10 hours of bus riding because thank blog for iPads. We attended a festival on the second day, and Nora got to milk a goat. My friend Tara bought a Labubu made out of felt. (Can’t nobody tell me that heritage crafts aren’t on-trend.) There was mare’s milk ice cream and boorsok (fried dough) and a plov (rice & meat & veg) lunch.

I did manage to come down with some horrid stomach situation the night we arrived at the yurt camp. But, you know, if the nightmare of yurt camping is being ill in shared campground bathrooms, maybe my takeaway is that I’m not as high-maintenance as I thought. Maybe this generation of my family can be lake people after all?

After expelling all of the demons by one in the morning, I managed to sleep the rest of the night with total gratitude and stillness. A bug crawled across my neck, and I flicked it aside without fully waking up. It started to rain, and the yurt began to smell like wet sheep. I dreamed more deeply. I woke in the morning to the sound of Nora’s excited voice. The lavender was blooming outside our yurt. The lake was shimmering. The breeze was blowing. I was alive! And well! Yurt camping, who knew?

And now, having made it over the hump of summer community events, we leave on Saturday for a long vacation.

I’ve been putting off writing a newsletter because I didn’t think I had much new to say. Other people’s vacation countdowns can be tedious, if not obnoxious. Then there’s what I’ve come to think of as the Continuing Uncertainty. We still might get fired, but who knows—something about the Supreme Court, and also maybe just different horrific things will keep happening to put off our ultimate demise?

Everything still feels terrible out there, and it could have been the news out of Texas and Florida that made me ill, rather than a suspicious boiled egg at the kattama stand.

Today I brought the wading pool I’d purchased for the fourth of July back to the house and set it up on the porch. Nora, returned to me safe and happy from a day at camp, splashed around all afternoon and declared this day to be “so, so, so, so, so fun.”

After receiving a bit of dismissive misinformation that “there is no good clothes shopping in Bishkek,” I’ve managed to find a few hidden gems in the malls, and have enjoyed replacing my circa 2021 summer wardrobe of tattered Target dresses with linen, which makes me feel very Diane Keaton. I’m leaning into this aesthetic rather than the adjacent Nora Ephron “I feel bad about my neck” emotions, which are also true and real. (Age spots didn’t surprise me, but the neck wrinkles send my life flashing before my eyes, and soon I’m confronting ideas like “one day Nora will turn 18 and move away.”)

All of this to say, I am living very close to the surface of things, and also caught in that delicious moment after the work is done and before the vacation begins, which is probably psychologically even more pleasurable than the time away. And there isn’t anything new to say, but is there ever?

If you’d like to follow along with whatever whimsy we encounter in the UK over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting to Instagram @dotdberg.

I hope however your summer is shaping up that you also get to experience the moment of lightness between work and play. I’ll be back in August with a report on where England fits on Nora’s scale of vacation judgment (India ranking low due to too much time in the car / not enough cats; Greece ranking high for exactly the opposite.)

Stay out of trouble, stay in touch,

Dot

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DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this newsletter are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Department of State or the US Government.

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