Shabbat Shalom

Jon was sick all day and stayed in bed, sleeping. He has a fever and chest congestion and he feels bad. Took a covid test this morning, negative. But whatever this is, it's taking it out of him. Of course he hates to be sick when we are traveling, but at least we are not trying to move from one place to the next. Staying in one place is the best.  (He is the photo editor of this blog so we have to wait until he is ready to come back to work.)

Benjamin walked to the small market that is open on Shabbat and got Jon some drinks.  I had a quiet morning sitting outside on the patio in the garden that has blooming trees around the edges and unmowed ground cover where grass would be if this were the States. It was lovely. I wrote notes to people and did more fussing with the CSA stuff.

Yael and Mika and Benjamin and I walked up to the commercial center of this neighborhood to have lunch. Tree-lined streets help to define this as an upper middle class area. Mika meandered, cheerful and unperturbed about any sort of destination or timeline.  We ended up at a cafe that is American-style, I guess, but since things are in Hebrew I kind of missed that for a while.  I had shakshuka and salad because I am in Israel. They had more American fare. Mika drank a lot of a spirolina shake (Yael read about it -- it's a seaweed that humans and animals can eat) and gave herself a lovely green mustache. After lunch, Yael told Mika to go exploring and so she did, tentatively. She found someone nice to talk to, and Benjamin joined the conversation and by the time Yael and I got there, we had decided they must be speaking English because they were just gabbing. Nope, Hebrew. Benjamin said later he was working hard to keep up.

 

 I came home to take a Shabbes nap with Jon before heading across the street to babysit.  The parents went to visit some friends and Mika and I had a calm evening of soup, bath, books, bed.  But then about ten minutes later she sat up to howl that she wanted some more attention and I brought her out to join the Newcomb zoom call.  She was a happy participant. And then she went to bed just fine.

We have all been much distracted and worried by Alissa's situation -- she has been in the hospital for a few days trying to figure out what is going on with her eyes. This is a worrisome time, and she has been much supported by her boyfriend and Anna. That story is being told elsewhere, but it is definitely hard to be so far away right now.

This trip has been everything we could have hoped for, except for Jon getting sick and Alissa being in the hospital. What can you do.