home away from home

Ah: the feeling of being back in a familiar place after months away. While hardly my home away from home (I’ve probably spent less than 6 months out here in my entire 28 years of existence), I have my aunts and uncles and cousins—people I do feel at home with. Continuing the trend as I’ve moved eastward through the past month, I’ve been getting more vegetables in my diet, beginning most mornings with the local traditional salad (small-chopped tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, peppers, lemon juice, olive oil) and avocadoes from my uncle’s tree. As of late my breath has taken on raunchy notes despite my diligent oral hygiene—due in large to a daily diet of garlicky “salads” such as hummus and various plays on eggplant themes. Still, I press forward in my never-ending quest for perfect dishes. Such as the hummus by “Gingi” (“redhead,” in this  case used as a nickname), a kibbutz-dwelling religious man making a daily batch of hummus and falafel, selling it by the plateful to hungry lunchers, closing up shop as his mise-en-place is 86ed. Dr. Shakshuka's shakshuka (a fresh tomatoey ragout on which eggs are poached) wasn't bad either.

An early heat wave has been gripping most of the country, making for a sticky and drippy visit, though only to the betterment of the fruit. I’ve made the best of the local strawberries, eating them as nature intended—by the bowlful. The kumquats we sought and paid so dearly for at Craigie Street Bistrot drop to the ground by the treeful, their trees unable to convince my aunt and uncle to make use of their amazing fruit. A tropical orange fruit here called Shesek has  followed me from Morocco, except for that instead of paying for them here, I get to liberate them from friends’ trees, as they head in a similar direction as the doomed kumquats (down). Anat’s dog, between being tortured by the neighbor’s puppy wolf dog, wolfed down (yeah: heh heh) the few fruit we didn’t see fit for our own consumption.

And then there’s that which universally makes family family. The bickering. The shouting. Arguing with my uncle about the near and dear topic of global warming—him adamantly taking Michael Crighton’s fictional preposterous stance we humans had nothing to do with this latest cycle.

Warm spring afternoons and evenings spent dining in the garden...in the end feeling oddly at home.