Now the forsythia is a splash of yellow against my courtyard wall, and the leaves on the rose bushes are unfolding, albeit warily lest a cold snap might still be poised to freeze them.It’s been a strange winter. Well, actually it’s not been a winter at all in any meaningful sense of the word. We had one weekend of heavy snowfall followed by a week of sleety showers, then that was it. None of that knee-deep snow of yesteryear. None of that teetering down the hill, afraid at any minute to feel the ground turn to ice beneath the feet. Global warming, people mutter sagely, and I’d be inclined to agree with them were it not for memories of a winter 10 years ago when I well remember entertaining guests to a potluck lunch on the terrace slap in the middle of February.
So spring is in the air, and we duly celebrated the first wedding of the season at the Dedeman Hotel where a woman from the Black Sea married one of our local guides in a flurry of flares, and with a cake to rival the Eiffel Tower in loftiness. In attendance were a group of students from Texas who will be staying with local families for a few days and helping their children with their English. “Was it as you expected?” we asked them. “Well, actually it wasn’t that different from home,” they chorused.
Otherwise we’ve been sitting about in the sun twiddling our thumbs and appreciating the lull before the storm that will be the upcoming Easter tourist season. I was taking tea with a couple of men who represented the two faces of local life when suddenly the conversation veered toward religion. In the green corner was a man with a colorful past, in the blue corner another who’d opted for the straight and narrow.
“Why is Islam so down on sex?” railed the first of the two.
“It isn’t,” came the retort. “It’s only down on sex outside marriage. It’s the same with all the world religions. They all say the same things are wrong,” and he proceeded to reel off a set of Islamic prohibitions that certainly did sound very similar to the Biblical 10 Commandments.
“Then there’s alcohol…”
“Well, yes, alcohol,” and they both laughed as they sipped their teas, the one who would as happily have downed a beer right then and there and the one who has probably never touched a drop of it in his life.
It was an amiable argument, but I squirmed in my seat, afraid that I might be called upon to adjudicate. Then came the inevitable question: “Are you going to become a Muslim, Pat?”
“At the moment, I’m more worried about Turkish citizenship,” I laughed, and we moved swiftly on to less contentious topics.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
