Seventh Sunny Day In A Row

I was thinking that when you take a trip to visit family, you don't get to choose the locale.  When we were growing up, we were fortunate to have lots of family in Hawaii (we still are) and we were also lucky that our travel season was in the winter, so going to Hawaii was especially nice.  This is the first time we have had close family to visit in a foreign country.  Usually when we take the time to go on an international trip, we are on the move all the time, seeing sights, going from one memorable or ancient spot to the next. This has been very much like a Hawaii trip, with a focus on the people we came to see rather than the beach or the ruins or the scenery. Haifa in the winter is no hardship. Right outside our door are palm trees and flowering bushes.  From many places within a few blocks of here, you can see the Mediterranean Sea, blue and vast, with a distant horizon. 

Which is all to say that we are still hunkered down on Kadima Street. I walk between our Airbnb and Chez Mika while Jon stays in bed, gradually improving. He is getting better.  And we did get him some antibiotics, on the advice of some of our personal doctors. It is not entirely clear that he needed them but we are supposed to get on a plane in four days and if he has pneumonia, we are stuck here. So in some ways we are smacking this illness with a big flat stick, just in case.

This morning I had the pleasure of taking Mika to the park myself, as her parents had stuff to do and I didn't. On our way, we stopped in to say hi to Jon (she has been asking for him, wondering where he is: "Papa?" when she hears a key in the door). She was glad to see him. We picked some lemons, and she insisted on taking one with us to the park.  She took me through all the paces, swinging (and singing the traditional Hebrew song that every parent sings while a child is on the swings -- because I clearly wasn't competent to sing it myself), going down the slide, telling me when it was time for snacks, taking me on a walk.  This is her daily routine. On our way home we stopped to see Jon again because why wouldn't we?

 

While she took her nap, I created a little larder of food for the bed-bound because it is getting to be time for Jon to start eating again. Rice, soup, a few boiled potatoes, brought home the lemonade syrup that Benj had made out of an earlier pile of lemons.  Came home to the infirmary. It is so easy to spend hours and hours reading and writing and drinking tea and serving lemonade and soup. The day just glides by.

Even though nothing goes quite as we might have imagined, there are many sweet parts to every day.

Mika insisted on Hana peeling the lemon so she could eat it. It turned out not to be a pomolo.