How go those wintry nights?

It goes without saying that I am highly appreciative of my dedicated woodstove. She is assured of a healthy raise and front office next season. We are companionably barricaded together in one room most nights … which statement makes me reflect that I sound like a questionably sane individual communing with a cat. I am unhappily aware of a thread of truth in that.



The valiant stove herself, courtesy of Jani Vreto's dormitory


When I’m not sleeping at home, I’m being introduced to Albanian life behind wintry doors by Visa, her family, and friends from work. I show up with wool socks and am unyieldingly ordered into house shoes. The tiles are cold, and the mamas are fierce.

Albanian winters are, for most, the time to flee inside immediately following work, pour flavored roux over përshësh (crumbled bread), twitch the antennas to face a vast sky awash with stars, and pray for Grua e Hekurt (an infinitely popular, and happily subtitled, telenovela) to defy the weather and bless our apartments. Hajde hajde noble Valentina, bursting blouses, evil fake baby mamas, and dastardly, mustachioed vacqueros! Valentina and her many trials are the daily fuel of teacher room conversation.

When the electricity, humbled by ferocious wind storms of biblical proportions, goes out for hours on end, we light candles, drink çaj mali (mountain tea), and engage in battle over dominos. Visa’s mother taught me to say the names of all the tiles, and Visa sent home a set to my parents. Evenings with them, pressing my feet to the side of their generous stove, are comfort. Honestly a lot of fun and entirely untradeable for central heating, generators, and smug cable connections.

If there’s anything I’ve learned thus far this winter, it’s that simple pleasures are doubly gratifying when you have less. And that you ought to always have candles stashed in a place you can grope your way to in the dark.



Miss Visa, the designated Turkish kafe maker




From left to right: Shpresa, Visa's mother; Ilda, neighbor, friend, and village teacher; Mika, Ilda's mother and Shpresa's close friend; Visa