justwrite 23 november

Time passes, as it often does.
There’s enough time for the woman in the red plaid wool beret to explain to the hygenist exactly how she’d like her teeth to be cleaned. There’s time for Nadiya to nod, agreeing, as she always does, with Mrs. Pansyuk’s harmless know-it-all-ism. There’s time for me to nod at them from the sidewalk, only a few feet away, with a perfect walking-by view.
There’s time enough to see another pair of dental clinic employees chatting in a nearby frame: one stirring a small cup of brownish foam and the other drinking from a small cup of coffee with cream.
There’s plenty of time for dentistry, as it turns out.
There’s plenty of need for dentistry here, it seems, if it’s fair to judge need based on supply. The number of clinics and offices offering dental work surprises me. At first, I had the wrong idea about many of these places, mainly because the word used was stomatolog. So, naturally, I assumed that this meant “stomach-ologist” or, stomach doctor. This made sense to me—Ukrainians love to eat and drink heartily, so a stomach doctor would probably come in handy on occasion. But no, this means dentistry. So much for cognates.
So.