A few winter days at home

Winter in Jerusalem. Haze settles down on the hills — a mixture of moisture and fine dust. The city looks moody and atmospheric, a backdrop for a movie in which people have lots of intimate and ultimately despairing conversations. The wind picks up, blowing the white furniture on your mirpeset into the corner and covering it with a brown film. Leaves come down, branches, and random things people in higher apartments left outside. Then rain in great gusts.

Perfect weather to stay inside — especially if you have a cold. Read a book, watch “The Crown” on Netflix with its equally gloomy lighting. Drink tea. Feel sorry that you are not attending all the parties you were invited to: a birthday at Birateinu (Our Beer), a sufganiyah and mimosa brunch, Shabbat dinner, a Motsash (Motsei Shabbat — End of Shabbat) hot chocolate party. Feel, at the same time, glad you don’t have to go out at all!

Have you wasted your life? Are you wasting it now? When are you going to do something remarkable, write that novel? Here you are in Jerusalem, and you’re not doing a thing different from what you would do at home. Are you, in fact, capable of facing these days, weeks, months ahead, struggling with your pitiful Hebrew, contending with foreignness every time you leave the apartment? Was this, after all, a good idea, these months abroad? Do you really have it in you? You light your Chanukah candles, your Shabbat candles, watch the days pass, feel sorry for yourself.

Then one day you wake up feeling better. The sun is out, the wind has died down, the rain has washed away all the dust. Green shoots are poking up out of the bare soil and out of cracks in every wall and sidewalk. Your nose has largely stopped running. You pull yourself together, take your agala (“Bubbe cart”) and your list, set off for the shops. You manage to sign up for a mardon (membership card) in the natural foods store without using more than one or two words of English. You find an enormous organic cauliflower, and – -the find of the month — black currant jam and marmalade from Chivers of England. You make a date to meet friends from out of town for dinner. You do some laundry and hang it out, sweep, wash dishes, attack the mildew that grows on every sheltered surface in your basement apartment.

Life goes on, after all. You are not incapable of tackling it. Perhaps, even, there is something to be said for being in a place where instead of snow and ice, there is only dust and rain, Where “cold” is 45 degrees fahrenheit, where lemons ripen in people’s small yards, and where most of the population is actually celebrating the same holiday you are….