About a year ago I watched a movie called Interstellar. It was about a man who went into space to find a new world, because earth was burning up. He had a wife and a young 10-year-old daughter when he left. When he finally found her again, she was an old woman.
He had missed life. He had missed HER life. And isn’t that what our lives are….raising our children and watching them grow up?
Today at the pool, I watched the young mothers and their babies. I was jealous. Just a few years ago, I was one of those young mothers. My young children were always with me. We played, we sang, the tiny house was a mess and there was never any privacy. I was happy.
Now my children are teens. They aren’t clustered around me anymore. They are independent. They travel and hitchhike; they go to their school tests, or visit their friends all on their own…they don’t need my help. They make their own plans. They are social. They aren’t really like kids so much anymore. It doesn’t sadden me or anything. I helped them grow into the teens they are. It just happened fast…
Life here in the summer is much the same as it’s always been….(the Corona pandemic doesn’t affect our lives here in the yishuv.) We suffer from hot days, and have the pool to cool off, but there’s not much else. At night, people go on walks. The kids make fires. We sleep in a tent.
Traveling on the roads at night can be uneventful, but sometimes things are dangerous. Terror attacks have certainly not declined during these last months of Corona. Stone throwing abounds at night, and can be deadly. Car rammings, shootings, molotov cocktails, homemade bombs also happen. Regularly. And our emergency medics respond to it all. They drop everything to help.
Tonight on the “big grass” in Susya, there is an outdoor dinner, with a stage set up for performances of “spoken word.” This is Summer in Susya….not bad. We couldn’t continue it without our first responders, always standing by.
