a sojourner's home

My apartment building is pink and five floors high. We (my roommate and I) are comfortably situated on the fourth floor. Our apartment is located in the first entrance of the building – which means a few homeless people and drunks end up in the stairwell to sleep. If it's not people, it's stranded puppies.

On one side of us is a big, white Khaan Bank (the Mongolian version of Wells Fargo). On the other side is a continuous row of multi-colored apartment buildings that end in more continuous rows of multi-colored apartment buildings. If I look down outside my living room window there is a row of old storage containers used as garages. Little kids like to climb up on these and run wildly across, jumping fearlessly over the gaps (some fall, but most make it over). If I look up, I see the broad side of an oatmeal colored apartment building dotted with tiny rusted balconies. In one window is a paper Santa Claus which has hung there everyday for the past two years. I can see nothing beyond this wall of gravely concrete and windows except a slice of blue sky.

If I look out my bedroom window, my view just grazes the roof of a building that houses, among other things: a church, driving school, hair salon, food shop, tailor, print shop and dry cleaner. On Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings you can hear the steady, irritating beat of drums from the worship services at the church. Beyond this, to my everlasting delight, are the mountains.

From the end of March to the beginning of September is the only span of time that the mountains are not shrouded in a thick wall of coal smoke for most of the day. From March to June the mountains are a bit depressing and naked as the sheets of snow melt, revealing all that has been dead and dormant for six months. They stand like giant, crusty brown masses on the horizon, a little embarrassed even of themselves. Then slowly, between June and August, the mountains regain their green and you feel a great relief to know that beauty and life does exist beyond the exhaust fumes and cracked asphalt of the city. From the end of August to October the green slowly disappears and is replaced by a dry, rusty-gold. What once was draped in a green velvet is now swathed in prickly burlap. You feel itchy just looking at the mountains. However, the rusty-gold is soon replaced by a cloak of snow. And from that point on until the end of March, whenever you can glimpse the mountains through the smoke, they remain cuddled underneath their winter skin.