Senses

If it weren't so gradual, it would be debhabilitatingly overwhelming. And yet still there's always a moment of recognition, and in this case the moment seemed realized in all its aspects via an attack on my senses.

The trigger is the acrid smell filling and burning my nostrils. It's been inescapable in the valley these past few days, drifting in through doors and windows from its source, the regenerative burn of the rice paddies. It says something for the strength of the smell that we even notice it in a place where most of the industry is concerned with regularly blowing things up in the process of inventing and refining fireworks.

As if in an attempt to match the bitter scent, a dull haze hangs between the hills turning photographs into water colours by stealing their clean crisp lines. Individual trees on the hills are blurred to an indistinct blurred dark green. Stopping to take a look around me on my way down the road for a dinner at another small resuruant know only as The Purple Tablecloth, I can see the fields have lost the lush green color that surrounded the school when I arrived replaced with a mottled pale green and gold, some fields ripening before their neighbors. The soft texture and lush sway of a nearly infinite number of ripening stalks have also given way to a countable number of stunted and sharp stalks and roots left to be burned as fertilizer for the next year's crop. Anywhere there is smooth concrete, the streets are paved in a pale gold layer of drying rice. The view brings thoughts in my head of the yellow brick road of Oz.

The taste of the moment is one of dry dustiness. Otherwise rare throughout the year, the short fall brings a few weeks of satisfying respite to bridge the oppressive funrnace of a Liuyang summer and the damp bonechilling cold of an unheated winter. The leaves along the road must also feel this as I notice them covered in a dull reddish coat kicked up by the occasional passing truck. While the farmers race finish the harvest before the cold and rain arrives, these leaves must hope that moment hurries along. I for one can at least quench this thirst with a cold beer at my destination.

The only sound I notice is the rhythmic whirring and whining of the hulling machine. A husband and wife, neither more than five and a half feet tall stand by the side of the hulling machine. A cigarette dangling loosely from his lips, he greets me with a soft 'ni hao', audible but delicate enough that the ash holds it's loose form at the end of the cigarette rather than falling to the ground, before turning back to his work. He is collecting the valuable rice into enormous bags while it's discarded armour plinks to the ground cracked and defeated. His wife, concerned only with maintaining the steady beat of the hulling machine stares following my progress down the road, her right arm, cranking and turning the dark brown wooden handle with muscle memory as its infallible guide.