TЮTЮH

tobacco.
the bike wheels jumped with uncertainty across the cobblestones that made up something resembling a road. i had seen it many times before turned into a lake, a mudslide of animal feces and dirt and fresh rain, but today is was dry and the sun was beating down hard. i turned when i saw the mosque and parked the bike next to a field of 8 women, dressed from head to toe in the scorching heat.
"is Gülten here?" i asked and i trudged forth between the high stalks. she turned around, familiar face with hair all hidden under a cotton kerchief. to her left one of my colleagues, Seyarey, smiled widely and said that she would hug me if she wasn't so dirty.
they showed me how to pick the leaves, starting at about eye level and working down; sticky things really. we stacked them in our hands and periodically handed them off to another woman, who slid the piles down large metal tongs which she would later thread to make bundles. i was going slower than everyone else, but everyone refrained how much they appreciated the help.

when we finished only about an hour later (i had come around 10:30 but they had been at is since 7) and we took a lunch break. i rode home to wash the dirt off my hands, which proved to be a trickier task than i expected. in a little while i returned, then my hair all wrapped in kerchief, and we started the next step of the day-- gathering the bundles, moving them from the field to the woman's garden. a donkey cart was soon enlisted to help, but there being no donkey, the woman (Ayshe), Gulten and I pushed the cart back and forth between destinations. other women were at work unstringing the bundles and hanging them out in small greenhouses to dry. everywhere you looked tobacco, in all varying stages; green, sticky, heavy, wet. hundreds of leaves on a line. another greenhouse down, more yellowed, dry but not ready, withered under the august sun. we spent the afternoon that way- my first day of true manual labor.

"15 days, again" Ayshe said. somehow throughout the day she had become one of my new favorite people in the world. this was her tobacco, this was her labor and her livelihood. such a sizable group of us had worked all day, and in fifteen days we would go back and do it again, gathering the higher leaves that today we left behind. at the end of the season she might collect 500 leva for the lot of it. that comes to around $260.

"say it in Turkish" someone suggested to me, and my mind searched for a moment.
"On-besh gün. Geljem." i said. "Fifteen days, I will come."
the ladies all laughed.