I might be drinking it by myself sitting in a café. A notebook with blank paper, (no lines) and my favorite pen on the table. I recline back in my chair, taking in the street and the people. I take a deep breath, for once I am content. I have always liked to write in […]
We light the first candle for the first night of Hanukkah. After a long and heated discussion, the girls, my four daughters, picked a blue candle and a white one for the Shamash (the candle with which the other candles are being lit). My father put the Hanukkiah on the living room windowsill, the window […]
From my retirement diary Once a week, we deliver meals to the elderly who are homebound. My husband drives, and I knock on doors and wait for the person on the other side to shuffle their way to the door. Some let me in, and we talk for a few minutes. Others open a narrow […]
A few minutes into the journey when the train makes a sharp turn and enters the mountain ravine, I am ready. My face pressed to the window, I follow the brook running from one side of the tracks to the other. Maybe, this time, I will see them. Emek Refaim. The valley of the giants. […]
Ever since I read Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar as a young child, I have always found the idea of long train travel appealing. I was drawn in by the relatively slow opening up of new vistas, as well as the option to stroll the train and sleep in a sleeping compartment. The only […]
I stand by my parents’ graves, as I do every year around the week of Hanukkah. It is a cool winter day; the skies are grey except for a pink cloud hanging on the horizon beyond the two cedar trees that were planted next to the graves twenty years ago. The trees are slightly crooked […]
