Normal life

 Everything is so relative. Missiles from Yemen are already less scary, after the missiles from Iran that killed and destroyed thousands of homes just by bouncing off hundreds of meters.

On Friday evening I returned from a family dinner about an hour's drive from here, I'm always happy when there are no alarms on the way. I got home and sat down on the couch, it was ten thirty at night and then that scary sound that announces an alarm in a few minutes. Of course I ran to the shelter and there I met everyone else again, including the little children who woke up from their sleep scared and the dog Bella who is still very scared by every alarm.                                                                                                                    This morning at 6 a.m., the same sound announcing an upcoming alarm, and the neighborhood meeting at the shelter. Fewer people are coming, maybe because they've gotten used to it, maybe because these are missiles from Yemen, not missiles from Iran.                                                                                                           It's strange to me how adaptable we are. We sit in a shelter for ten minutes, with alarms and explosions above us, and ten minutes later we go out, each to our daily routine, as if this were normal life.                                   

The picture is of Edmund the cat, who is no longer with us, who also knew how to turn any crisis into a normal event.

There is still hope.

There is still hope, perhaps. I hope.

 

Another day

 In recent days, we have been 30 adults in the neighborhood shelter and 15 children, the oldest of whom is 8 years old and the youngest is a one-month-old baby. She has been to the shelter more than ten times. Sometimes at three in the morning and sometimes at more reasonable times. She is still quiet and sleeping even during the alarms. More and more people are coming to the shelter because of the difficult images on TV of families who entered the protected room and after the alarm, found themselves in rubble and collapsed buildings.                                                                                                                                                    There is supposedly a ceasefire now, but no one believes anyone.

I am still on alert all the time with my iPhone with me everywhere, not to miss a single alert.                                                     I have a headache, I haven't had one in years, I think it's mostly because of the debates on blogs with people who have something to say. I need to learn to ignore it.

                            

Lies I read in Blogland

 Blogland is a kind of parallel universe. People write about their lives, and that's what I love about it, the little details of everyday life, the flowers blooming in the garden, the food, the joys and worries, and sometimes also real troubles, illnesses and heartaches. A human encounter with people we will never meet in real life.

But sometimes it's a hard and cruel place where I encounter evil. For a few days now I've been trying to ignore it because I really have much bigger and more important things to worry about, like the moments when I could die at any moment from the ruins of my house or from the impact of a ballistic missile carrying a lot of small bombs that explode far away.                                                                                                    But I will write about it anyway.

Most people here in Blogland are wonderful and good, I think there are only two ladies who irritate me right now. One of them suffers from hatred of Israel and latent anti-Semitism, I noticed this a long time ago, when she was unable to feel compassion for us after October 7th and gave it an open expression. This week she wrote that a hospital here was not blown up, she heard about it on the BBC or some other station.                                                                                                                                                                              The truth is that the hospital was shelled and its wards were destroyed, there were no casualties because they were prepared for this in advance. The disdain and distortion of the truth are part of the same syndrome of anti-Semitism. Our lives are worth less in her eyes because we are Jews and Israelis. I have no other explanation.                                                                                                                                                                   The second woman is simply a blogger with no real knowledge. She has to express an opinion on a subject she understands nothing about, and I didn't find any humanistic side in her either, even though she declares herself as such.                                                                                                      All in all, two women who irritate me greatly and I wonder why I dedicated a post to them. I answer to myself that I did it because they represent a much broader and more dangerous phenomenon.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  In the picture - our sky after the interceptors head out towards the missiles.                                   It's above my house.

Saturday morning

 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.

                                                                                                             

Life here

 This is the situation right now. 100 unmanned aircraft but loaded with explosives are making their way from Iran to us. It is expected that when they are close there will also be ballistic missile firing. It takes them nine hours to arrive, so we are all glued to our phones and televisions to receive the alerts in time. But it is clear to everyone that we do not really know what will happen.

There was an alarm throughout the country at three o'clock in the morning and we all met again in the shelter.

Now we are waiting for something that we know will be different from what we have experienced so far, it is not boring here.

My grandson in other times, in the picture.

Friday morning thoughts

 A while ago, one of my very good friends here in Blogland asked me how my English, which was so bad at first, improved so much. I told him that I learn languages ​​quickly, and it's true. I learned German as a child just by listening to conversations between my mother and grandmother, and that's how I also learned French and even Yiddish from neighbors' conversations on the street. There were many Holocaust survivors among the neighbors at the time, and almost everyone spoke Yiddish when they didn't want children to understand. I understood.                                                                                                                            From here I also moved on to thinking about how goals change, there were times here in blogland when I was looking for security and support. During times when it was difficult here (back then I didn't know it could be even harder), every kind word gave me the illusion of protection and I looked for it, although it was only words, but it was also something. At the time, there were two strong and sturdy American men who were very supportive of my blog and who I was, until one of them wrote to me that he could no longer withstand the attacks of the trolls that came to him because of me and he disappeared, and the other stopped writing for his own reasons. The heroic men left me alone in the battle.                                        When the really tough times came on October 23rd I noticed that there were people who couldn’t operate in a vacuum and needed someone real to vent their anger, opinions and feelings to, and they turned that on me, as if I really had any influence on what was happening around me.

Someone even asked in their post if they could ask me to tell our government to do all sorts of things.

I became more cautious and confused. Old friends disappeared, but new and wonderful people arrived, and for that I am grateful.                                                                                                                                               I'm still very cautious and also busy with this strange adventure called survival, a kind of real-time reality show. I don't drive at night because you never know if there will be an alarm, about once every two days I run to the shelter, if I finish my shower at the time I like I see it as some kind of small victory or miracle,                                                                                                                                             I recognize an adventurous part of myself that tells itself what interesting and crazy times we live in, but inside me there is also a cowardly woman who is equally frightened by the sounds of mice at night.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 A picture of my daughter, from a long time ago.

Quiet life

 As if there were no shortage of dramas in our lives, yesterday there was extreme weather, extreme heat and very strong winds and with them came a huge fire. Everything happened here around me.

I was not at home. Like every Wednesday I was in charge of the children's driver, feeding and enjoying them, I saw everything on TV and wondered how I would get home. Although lately I always wonder how I will get home because of the missiles, but this time it was different.

Flames of fire on the scale of the Los Angeles fires, main roads were closed, people were forced to abandon their cars on the road and flee, towns were evacuated and there was great drama.                                     All of this happened around my house, but my community is still not evacuated. Independence Day celebrations were supposed to start, but everything was canceled. In any case, no one feels like celebrating at this time.                                                                                                                                                                   In the afternoon, my daughter and I decided that maybe I should drive in daylight, which I've been doing lately anyway because of the missiles. We checked on our phone and saw that the road was safe, and so I arrived home safely again.

The air is still full of the smell of smoke, but the wind has calmed down and the temperatures have dropped. All that remains is to wait for the next drama.

Friday

 You can now tell 3 minutes before the alarm that a missile has been launched from Yemen. The army activated a new app and it did work for me this morning at 6:30.

It was definitely different going to the shelter before the alarm and waiting. I was the first, second came the dog Bella, who never waits for her family members when the alarm sounds. The athletic mother arrived barefoot with the child, who also ran barefoot to the shelter at 6:30 in the morning.

We heard the echoes of the explosions, waited ten minutes, and returned to normal life, as if nothing had happened.                                                                                                                                                                       

The afternoon of Passover

 I really liked the previous post. Writing about food and holiday atmosphere felt normal again. When I write about missiles and alarms I feel a bit like a victim, and I don't like it, but it's the reality I can't ignore. Still, I felt really good when it seemed like I could pretend everything was okay again.                                               Even the troll who a few days ago wished me that my grandchildren would die in war and threatened me that they would come back to eliminate me too, also wrote one comment, something about the government, I don't really read everything he or she writes, before I delete, but he or she was quieter than ever.

I decided that I would only write about good, positive things, I sat down and read John Gray's blog and almost had time to write a comment and then the following thing happened-                                                                  My son, who is a subscriber to some Telegram group that announces the launch of missiles from Yemen before the alarms, came and said that we should go to the shelter because a missile had launched from Yemen. It was about five minutes before and saved us the running. I left John's blog and walked with him more or less leisurely to the shelter. We went down the twenty steps underground, and sat on the white plastic chairs. In the meantime, he called some neighbors and informed them that an alarm had been set off. The elderly neighbors had no way to get to the shelter quickly and there were no protected rooms in the house, but it's always good to know in advance.                                                                                                     And indeed the alarm came after five minutes. First came to the shelter the dog Bella, who always makes sure to run first, crying and scared and just wants to be petted and that's what we do. Then the family of young athletes with their small children.

We are supposed to wait ten minutes in the shelter after the alarm because that's when the fragments of the interceptor missiles fall in our area. Since these are ballistic missiles, their fragments are the size of a regular missile, and that's definitely unpleasant.                                                                                                            We did wait the ten minutes, and then I went back to writing the comment on John's blog.

Our Passover

 This was our table yesterday. We decided to celebrate Passover a day early, because we still count our steps at night. Today is the real day of the holiday and we know who likes to interrupt us, so we decided to be clever and it was excellent.

The table was simple, but everything was delicious. The wonderful roast was prepared by the 13-year-old grandson, and it felt like an experienced grandmother had cooked it.                                                                           The "gefilte fish" which is actually traditional fish patties in a sweet sauce, a favorite dish only for me and my daughter, was bought in advance in jars, because we no longer have grandmothers to make it, but it tasted as if they had made it.                                                                                                           There was also chopped liver that my daughter made, excellent and delicious as we remembered from previous years, and of course matzot, which is the "bread" of Passover, thin, crispy and dry. Some love it and some really suffer from the idea that you have to eat it on Passover. We eat everything and therefore love it too. It was pleasant and happy and delicious.

New morning

 I really love the writer Natalia Ginzburg, born in Palermo in 1916, died in 1991. I have read every book of hers that has been translated into Hebrew.

Yesterday when I ran to the shelter at one o'clock in the afternoon I remembered a line from her book "The Little Traits", she writes about "the sirens that wounded the sky in the middle of the night and we woke the children up and went with them", something like that, that was their reality in Italy during World War II, and those are exactly my thoughts, sometimes when I sit in those minutes in the shelter, twenty steps underground, I think to myself this is an experience of other times,

Then we come out and our lives seem to be similar to the lives of everyone else in the world, but there is one part of the soul that anxiously awaits the next time.

Our nights

These are the chocolate eggs I bought today at the little store here that has everything. I'll put every two eggs in a bag, and I hope I don't forget the bags at night when I run to the shelter.

Usually the alarms are in the wee hours of the night and I'm always amazed by the three little children, ages three, four, and five, who come running with their pyjamas and barefoot to the shelter.

My heart goes out to them, and I want to give them something sweet.

They run about five hundred meters from their house to the shelter, and sit there with us until they hear the sounds of explosions, wait another ten minutes, and everyone goes home.

The other night I wasn't ready at three in the morning, I put my shoes on the wrong way around, and even when I noticed it, there was no time to fix it, so I ran with them to the shelter. No one noticed.