Here Comes Winter

To be fair to my friends from Canada – my other, colder home – I must confess. The weather has been less than perfect. Remember those photos of sunny beaches and blue skies? Long gone. Winter is back and it is nasty! But at least it’s never dull. It rains for a while, hard and violent, coming from every possible direction, making your umbrella useless (why do I even bother?) and soaking you to the bone, then it stops. A hole of blue sky forms in the big fat clouds and the sun shines warm through it, only to change moments later into an extreme wind storm, the kind that has pine trees bowing and palm trees dangerously swaying, their branches all brushed to one side in a fashionable do. The other day a lightening struck our house, enveloping the house in an eerie bluish burst of light, causing the heater to spark and followed with the most deafening thunder you ever heard, right there, outside our window. The weather forecast for the next 48 hours predicts hale, snow in the mountains, wind and floods. Already today, on the way home we drove through roads that suspiciously resembled small rivers. At Sean’s request, we took a drive by Tel Aviv’s seawall. The beach was covered in haze, the waves were massive and the water dark. Nobody was swimming, not even the Russian immigrants. I’m pretty sure it would be suicidal.

I talked about it with my friend Tal who had recently moved back here from New York, after living there for many years and whining constantly about New York’s cold and long winters. “Now I’m here and I’m still complaining!” she said, “the tile floors are too cold, the houses never get warm enough.” “It’s simple,” I said, “we must move to Thailand. Now there’s a winter we can endure.”

Talking about enduring – Israelis become raging maniacs when they’re behind the wheel.. It must be in the blood, because I find myself on edge whenever we’re in the car. I don’t even have to drive. I put the classical music station on to calm me down, do breathing exercise to try and not scream. Still on occasion I explode: “What the **** is your ****ing problem? Would it kill you to let me in your *** lane???” Sometimes I honk the horn while Sean is driving. Honking is a popular way of communicating here. People honk when you try and park, because, well, you’re in their way. This is always accompanied with large hand gestures and glaring stares. Yesterday we spend an hour an a half in traffic and by the end of it I hated everybody and everything about my country.

But then it’s 22 degrees and sunny again and Ima is making me special food (I do nothing but eat here. Research? What research? I’m eating now. Leave me alone) and my nieces and nephews come to visit and I forget I ever hated it and fall in love with it all over again.