When Did Summer Become Such a Burden?

 

Saturday morning. I open the window and a wave of humid, hot air hits me square in the face, taking my breath away.

“I won’t be going outside today”, I say to myself and quickly close the window.

When did summer become such a burden?

Back when we were kids, the word summer had an almost magical connotation. Summer meant vacanta mare – the summer break, “the big holiday” as we called it. It meant freedom and friends, days filled with fun and games and peeling skin on our shoulders and noses.

Summer meant waking up to cool, fresh mornings that smelled like buni’s washing drying on the line, eating a quick breakfast and then running off to my friends and neighbors. There I would spend my days, returning home late in the evening, dusty and tired but with a sense of accomplishment.

The same was true for my siblings, too. They would run wild through the streets and parks of our neighborhood, like a band of untamed natives. We were unsupervised most of the time and if you happened to be the adventurous sort, like my brothers, summer also meant countless accidents that ended up in cuts, bruises and sometimes even broken limbs.

I was happy during the summers of my childhood. I would go and stay with my great-aunt and then my days would dissolve into long reading sessions beneath the apple trees in her orchard, supervised by her cats. Summer with my great-aunt also meant long afternoons splashing in a huge wooden barrel filled with water warmed by the sun. I can still remember the smell of the wet staves – briny and woodsy, with just a hint of smoke.

Once a week, my great-aunt would place her wicker basket over her arm and we would walk to the farmer’s market just at a stone’s throw from her house. She would march determined between the concrete stalls where the farmers displayed their produce, searching for the best fruit at the best price. She loved to bargain, my great-aunt.

Then we would return home with her basket filled with fuzzy peaches, shiny orange apricots, fresh vegetables and sometimes a huge, dark-green watermelon, almost too heavy to carry.

The summers of my childhood were endless days of wonder and discovery, of real and imaginary adventures.

There are so many beautiful memories that is impossible for me to hold them all in my mind, at once.

But, if I stay still for a while and listen carefully, they will come back to me, one by one. And I will write them all down, making them real once again, if only for a moment.

The Invisible, Suddenly Visible Summer

 

Last night, the summer I thought would be an invisible one for me became visible.

Iran attacked us.

And everything that I was carrying with me for the past weeks, months even, felt like a wave that came crushing over my head.

The sirens are back. The late-night run for shelter. The flashbacks.

And so is the fear. For my daughter. For my husband. The anxiety. The exhaustion of spending so much emotional energy on medical appointments, procedures, tests and uncertainty.  I though I could at least move through them, survive them like I always did. For the past 14 years.

But no. Suddenly, the pre-alarm sounded. The headlines said: “Hey, you have one more thing to add to your piles of worries”.

But I won’t stop living my invisible, suddenly visible summer. I will try to cope, as I always do, by writing. 

Words never fail me, they come when I summon them.  

Invisible Summer - The Beginning

 

Sunday

I have to go outside today, to take care of some important documents. Otherwise, I would’ve stayed at home. It’s summer and it’s already hot outside, and it’s not even noon.

I smear sun-protection all over myself.

The first thing I see outside our building is the overflowing garbage bin. They haven’t collected it in almost a week. Is there a garbage-people strike?

Under the unforgiving sun, the stench is unbearable.

On the road, a cleaning machine thingy putters away, doing nothing for the dirt.

There are a lot of people outside. The coffee shops took out on the sidewalk their tables and they are packed. Everybody speaks loudly, about prices and politics. Does anyone go to work these days?

The sidewalk is dirty.

A cat, black and white, a Zorro look-alike face, is waiting near the butcher shop’s door.

A man is looking for his dog, I think, shouting his name. Or his child?

I do some shopping. Mainly milk because there is a shortage of cottage cheese and yogurt, only God knows why. Maybe they want to raise prices again.

The cleaning machine thingy has caught up with me. It still doesn’t clean anything.

Near our building the garbage didn’t magically disappear.

I enter the coolness of the apartment. Klara watches me obliquely with her yellow eyes. “Where have you been?” Pitzi opens an eye and then promptly goes back to sleep.

I turn on the TV. A terrorist attack. One dead, five injured. The perpetrators were two Israeli Arabs.

 

So, What Do You Think We're Doing All Day?

Even if I have been so unwell (physically and mind-wise) don't you think, even for a second, that I haven't been fulfilling my duties as a mother. I try very hard to go on with our daily routine and for Maya to have a normal life...even if her mama is a bit...you know...gone with the fairies...
So, what are we up to these days?

Well, when it is too hot outside (oh, and in Israel this time of year can be very hot and humid) we build forts and castels

play with rice,

We make playdough pies and cakes

oh, and Maya likes to dress up, too...

We learn to read and write - thank you Carissa from 1+1+1+1, please visit her blog as she has some fantastic materials there!

We paint and draw a lot...

 as you can see, Dasha really appreciates Maya's creations...

During sunny mornings we make bubbles and three times a week Maya goes swimming!

And after all this hard work, one can relax...even if it means sitting in a basin...

...or eating a yummy pancake

We wish you all a great summer!

Lazy Days of Summer

Image by Storm Crypt via Flickr

It is so hot these days my brain has a jellyfish like consistency (and the same number of brain cells, for what matters). It is imposible to go outside during the day, the humidity makes the air hard to breath in and after a few minutes walking in the sun you feel like you're on fire...
So, what are we up to during this hot days? We stay indoors, turn on the air conditioning and read books, make puzzles, draw, play on the computer, watch TV, learn. Me and Maya, of course. If the weather permits we go outside in the evenings, although here, on the coast, in the evening the air is absolutely saturated with water and it makes Maya unconfortable.
For me, the best time is at night, after Maya goes to sleep. Then, I claim ownership of the desktop, do ab it of browsing and emailing and get to write for a while, until my eyes sting and I actually feel, like in slow motion, my head falling towards the table. My body got used to this rhythm and even if I try to go to bed earlier than one o'clock at night, I am not able to fall asleep.
I won't say I am bored, even though, believe me, I am...it is not easy being a staying at home mom...But I am ever so grateful that Maya is healthy now (touch wood) that I am not complaining. I enjoy spending time with her and telling her about this big, big world around us, reading stories and teaching her...She absorbs everything like the driest sponge and I pleased to see her grow physically and intelectually. What more could a mother ask?
So, yes, it is hot and we're bored but we lay in the afternoons on our couch in the living room watching DVDs and eating ice-cream and the air is dry and cool on my baby's skin and I kiss the tip of her nose and wipe ice-cream from her rosy cheeks and I say a prayer of gratitude and ask God to stop that damn flotilla preparing to come from Lebanon.

Splish, Splash

I remember when we were kids, during the summer our mother used to put outside, in the sun, a big basin filled with water and we amused ourselves for hours, playing and splashing. At our aunt's in was even better, because she had a huge wooden cask filled with water, and that was pure bliss, almost like being at the swimming pool.

We didn't need sofisticated toys back then, well, we didn't need/have toys and when we wanted something adventurous in the summer, we went to the nearby river bank, for a picnic, sunbathing and swimming in the warm, lazy, river water.

With Darie, my oldest, in post-communist Romania, immediately after Ceausescu's fall, things weren't that different. The same river, the same basin filled with water in the backyard and, as Darie grew older, cheap school camps, swimming pools and one-month holiday in the mountains for both of us, as a special treat. We, as kids, and then our kids, didn't need much to be happy.

Nowadays, well, after 20 years like in Dumas's novels, things are totally different. If you want your kids to have fun, you take them to a "water park", where the tickets will cost you an arm and leg and where sophisticated mechanisms spit, throw, splash, splatter water and there are water slides and a strong smell of chlorine.

Today we took the kids to "House of My Dreams", a sort of water/ entertainment park, where we had the water themed stuff on one side and all kind of contraptions on the other side. I forgot my bathing suit at home, so my sister was responsible for the wet part of the day, and we took the kids afterwards (when they were blue lipped and cold) to the rondabout, balls that were falling on their heads, some racing cars and..finally, McDonalds...Ugh...Well, at least the kids had fun, Maya especially, as you can see from the pictures. I returned with a headacke and a huge hole in our budget (just kidding!).