Year's End on the Frozen Steppe

December 29.  The autumn and winter that until now have been mild turned seasonal today.  The temperature dropped to -10C, the snow fell heavily, and the wind howled so fiercely that it woke me at 4am.  The walk to the Embassy, normally ten minutes in good weather, took twice as long as I walked sideways at times to make progress into the wind and shield myself from the biting snow.

Mid-December View of Astana and the Esil River

I say today was seasonal, but I'm getting used enough to Astana that even the "mild" weather of the preceding weeks would be seen differently by someone accustomed to the East Coast of the US.  Suffice it to say that I was snow shoeing last weekend and that ice houses have dotted the Esil River for some weeks now.  For anyone who wants to see winter in all her glory, Kazakhstan's northern steppe -- same latitude as Newfoundland and Labrador -- should rank high as a desirable destination.  Even if we have yet to see the -40C temperatures of a year ago, it is nevertheless abundantly clear that winter, Kazakhstan's longest season, has arrived.

With Colleagues at Astana's Ice City

It is a good time for brooding in all senses.  If some of that brooding seemed to take a negative turn in my last post (The Last Thing on My Mind), it did lead to a positive decision:  my overseas career will end when I depart Kazakhstan in mid-2017.  I will finish out my final two years in the Foreign Service back in Washington, closer to family and to home as I ease toward retirement.

That decision, once made, has had an effect I did not foresee.  Much as a person who is terminally ill might do all she or he can to live his/her life to the fullest that health will allow, so I, too, now know when my overseas life will end.  It has put a focus on the next year and a half that would not have been there had I not chosen to return to the US.  The next eighteen months are there to be lived fully and well so that there will be no retrospective regrets in the years to follow.  The closer the end date comes, the more precious each day will be.

Ten years.  My overseas career with the State Department began in September 2005 when I boarded a plane in New York bound for Moscow.  Since then I've only worked in the US for one year plus some months for language training.  I already find myself looking back with memories, some bad but mostly good.

Moscow.  It was a dream come true to be assigned to Embassy Moscow.  I traveled for the first time as a tourist to the Soviet Union in 1978 and then again in 1981.  In 1987-88 I spent six months on an IREX grant based mainly in Leningrad but with occasional travel to Moscow and Armenia, and this was followed by travel for conferences in 1994 and 2003.  Returning to Moscow in 2005, I felt I had landed in a city much changed from the one I remembered in the Soviet period.  The city was bright and alive with culture and commerce, and I spent every spare hour I could soaking it in.  My sisters came to visit, and my son spent a long summer.  When I landed in Moscow in 2005, it seemed that two years would last forever.  When the movers arrived to pack me out in August 2007, I had tears in my eyes.  The two years felt more as if they had been two months.

Tashkent.  I had never been to Central Asia before I arrived at Embassy Tashkent in April 2008, but I had long wanted to go there.  My interest in Uzbekistan had been there ever since the days I had devoted myself to researching the Stalin period purges in Soviet astronomy.  The fate of the Tashkent Astronomical Observatory and its director Alexander Postoev were key to many of the cascading events that extended all the way to Leningrad and that consumed the country's best astronomers.  Now I got to visit that observatory at last and share archival papers with the current director who was striving to restore the observatory's lost history.  Even if much of my life was being ever more consumed by a long and contentious divorce, I traveled and saw the historic cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, and Kokand.  My son came to visit twice, and we took long trips together to Karakalpakstan and the Ferghana Valley.

Bucharest.  I've already written volumes about my time in Romania.  As readers of my previous web journal know (http://attitude-analyst.blogspot.com), I thought my career was over when I first landed in Bucharest.  My assignment there seemed a disaster, but instead my three years in Bucharest were the making of the person I am today.  2012 was easily the happiest year of a life that has included many good years, and I now consider Romania a second home.

Work.  Yes, official work has kept me busy wherever I have served.  I've been busiest in Astana and in Moscow, least busy in Romania, and have participated in diplomatic endeavors that I'm proud to look back on.  Still, if I'm to look at the years I'm proudest of when it comes to official work, I will find them in the years when I worked on the Hubble Space Telescope project before joining the State Department.  

Christmas with NN

Life.  But when it comes to living and growing, it's been my overseas career with the State Department that wins out over anything that came before it.  I have made new friends wherever I have gone, and a few of them have become so close that I consider them to be part of my close family.  The pain of saying goodbye to PE when I left Romania was as great as if I were parting from my own son, but I also learned that distance does not have to break ties if the bonds are already strong.  So it is with PE, and so it will be with NN who entered my life shortly after I arrived in Kazakhstan some fifteen months ago.  I may have only one biological son, but I also have two emotionally adopted daughters who never would have entered my life had it not been for the Department of State.

Carving Turkey on Boxing Day with BL

And so, as 2015 counts down to its final hours, I look back and appreciate the past.  My Boxing Day reception with sixteen guests is now history, and NN and I will toast the New Year quietly at midnight, she with tea and I with a more traditional beverage.  I will think back fondly on all the friends I have made these ten years.  And then, with the fireworks that will fill Astana's wintry night sky fading to the future, I will turn and look in that direction as well with the purpose of living what remains of this international career fully and well.  And to all my readers I wish --

Happy New Year!  С Новым Годом!  An nou fericit!  Янги йилингиз билан!  Жаңа жыл құтты болсын!