Some of the children stayed to sleep in the shelter with their mothers. The missiles started arriving every four hours, volleys of dozens, and there are already homes destroyed and several dead in the center of the country. More neighbors who have not come to the shelter until now but realized that this time it is more serious than we thought it would be, some of them come with their dogs, but the dogs who are very anxious about the alarms are not always ready to make friends with the other dogs. The children are happy for the social event, they brought tablets and snacks and are playing games.
We are a little tired, when the Iranians take a break the Houthis from Yemen send their lone missile and that also requires his attention. In the few quiet hours I had, I managed to cook lunch for a family member. Our world now looks like a strange puzzle. There are parts that are sane, normal like anywhere else in the world, and there are parts that look like they were taken from a movie from another era.
The other day I traveled with my daughter and grandchildren to a small town in the north where a ceremony was held at a library named after my father, who wrote twenty children's and youth books and was greatly admired in this small town. We made an appointment with a Facebook friend of mine who is a resident of the city and a big fan of my father. She wanted to give us a tour of the small town where I was also born and has an interesting history. We arranged to meet at a restaurant in the city. When we got there, I saw an elderly woman sitting at the entrance to the restaurant. My intuition that it was a famous thing here in the family worked again. I asked her, "Are you Yehudit?" And she did answer yes. This was my kindergarten teacher, whom I had seen more than seventy years ago. She was very excited when I told her who I was, she remembered me and my family, which was well-known in the small town that was then a neighborhood of shacks. My grandmother was the dentist of the neighborhood at the time and everyone knew her. The kindergarten teacher, now almost ninety, was waiting for her husband who had gone to the bathroom at the shopping center. It was a complete coincidence that we met, but I believe it was not. There is some guiding hand in the world. We said goodbye excitedly. She asked me to come visit her and that we keep in touch. I will do that.