27 September 2026
Spending a lot of time alone with Yenah's grandmother's house while working. Getting up early, having my morning coffee, and sitting down to work each day at the kitchen table. As the sun rises, the tall white satin curtain spanning the length of the living room window starts to glow; one half of the curtain is reinforced by another pink one, so the diffused light that floods into the living room is half pink and half white. It bounces off of the red-orange wood floor, which creates a warm, saturated, matte environment in which highlights and edges are dulled. Magpies like to visit in the morning, and a handful of times I've pulled back the living room curtain to see them jockey for position on a persimmon tree. They're pretty aggressive, hip-checking each other off branches. Only two small horizontally-sliding screened windows in the house open to outside air, and tree branches sprouting vibrant green cross in front of the view out of both, so the feeling is one of life in abundance outside. Plants seem to grow well on the windowsills too.
My days here have been spent mostly in silence, but it's a busy silence. Just down the street is an elementary school, and I hear the rhythmic phases of its days—pale yellow buses snorting to a stop to deliver sleepy children in the morning, high-pitched screams as lunch hour arrives mid-day, and the frenzy of happy squeals and teachers repeatedly saying goodbye (“안녕히 가세요”) as school is let out for the day in the later afternoon. Some intermittent bells and layered chimes of groups of children singing throughout the day as well. On days where I do laundry, the laundry machine sounds like alternating white noise waterfalls and MRI-machine-like hollow knocks. Mosquitos are frequent visitors at this time of year, so a few times a day I'll also hear their sharp whines buzz by my ear (I've killed about thirty of them in the last month). The water here is so, so soft, especially compared to London, and the sinks (one in the bathroom and one in the kitchen) rush when turned on with a dutiful urgency that sounds like a mother shushing a baby. Similar to the Segokcheon Stream down the road from the house that runs all the way to the Han River.