looking out the window

The countryside along the train's path is littered with small agriculture based settlements.

Gypsies seem to often have a donkey pulled cart, the cart itself a wooden frame supporting a bed comprised entirely of a large net, so deep it nearly scrapes the ground below. Sometimes it contains crops, others refuse, or blankets, and on top a child or two.

The yards outside the walls are divided into tidy plots by an earthen mound that runs round each one. The preferred watering method seems to be periodic flooding, which these dirt walls facilitate.

Between settlements the desert returns, and there are flocks of sheep, or herds of cattle with a lone caretaker, and maybe a small mud brick shelter, or what looks like a gypsy wagon. My imagination falters at how life must be here for days, years on end.

Then as we approach a river or canal, the fields return- cotton being harvested by women and men bent over in the rows with a sack beside them; rice paddies green with new plantings; corn stubble with the stalks stacked in rows on the ground. Individual garden plots still have the bright green orbs of cabbages in rows.  In the markets you can find the physical evidence of harvest-potatoes, carrots, onions, green turnips, and more.

A donkey stands in the field by his owner, ears high, with a blanket and saddlebags made of some sort of rough grey wool, hanging almost to the ground on both sides. I wonder what they contain on any given day.  Riders on horseback sit and watch the train go by, a temporary distraction from the day's work.

Footpaths run out from the houses, between fields and plots. What's left after harvest is gathered in the fields and mounded-for fuel, perhaps, or animal fodder?

Near cities there are more signs of mechanization, such as tractors, but otherwise it seems like donkeys, horses and humans do the work.  Although I have no desire to regress to a life as basic, as hard as these country people must lead, I am intrigued by them, their practices, their understanding of their place in life. A lot of the allure of travel is the temporary taste of another way of life, the more foreign it is, the more exotic.

I wonder too at the apparent randomness that allows me to live in comparative ease, with freedom of place and nearly unlimited choice, as compared to those here who may never travel as far as Tashkent. Easy for me to assume they have dreams of education, opportunity or freedom from want, especially with regard to the place of women, but that is presuming things I cannot know.

I'm back in Tashkent, listening to the rain outside, and very glad I don't have to go out in it and carry in wood for the fire, or milk the cows.