 |
 |
 |
 |
The olives are in, and they look fantastic. There’s nothing like the feeling of being pelted by olives while having dirt and spiders rain down all around you. Maybe next year I’ll wait until all the olives are off the trees to start collecting.
In other news, I put up some pictures in the photo gallery. Enjoy!
Tomorrow morning we will have our biennial olive harvesting party. Our neighbors and friends will come over, we’ll lay sheets all over the yard, and we’ll shake the branches of our 2 syrian olive trees until they give us the best of this year’s crop. Then we’ll beat the branches with a stick untl the rest of the olives fall off. After that we’ll celebrate by eating loads of pancakes.
Our gardener was here the other day, and he left us with 2 blessings. He lopped off a few bunches of dates from our date trees.  We’ve had the trees since we moved in, but gracious they’re tall, and we never managed to get the dates off of them. Besides, they’re in Jerusalem, not in the desert, and we just figured that the climate wasn’t right here for producing good dates. Anyway, he left us strict instructions to leave them in the sun to dry, and we’ll see what we get. Our second blessing: it seems all the activity in the yard unhoused a resident we didn’t know we had - a tiny scorpion that decided that perhaps indoors was better than outdoors, and moved himself into Mom’s bathroom. This is an animal that I would love to capture and give a place of honor in our home, but I can’t, because Mom promptly picked up a shoe and turned him into a stain on the floor. C’est la vie, little guy.
The Feast of Tabernacles is over for another year, and let me just say that it was a fantastic Feast - the best in years and years. We thought attendance would be down due to “the situation,” but it wasn’t. We had about 5000 people from almost 100 countries. The music and dance were phenomenal. And somehow Franklin and I both managed to spend more time enjoying the Feast, and less time stressing out than in past years. I hope next year is even better.
So for now, we’ll collect everything our olive trees will give us, we’ll wash them, crack them, and soak them in brine and spices for the next 6-8 months. We’ll leave our dates in the sun and hope for the best. And we’ll be on the look out for other small, poisonous yard residents - to protect them from swift death at the hands (or shoes, should I say) of my mother.
It’s erev Yom Kippur. On this night in Jerusalem, there are no cars on the road. It’s a good excuse to get out and walk around in the streets - and everyone does it. Jerusalem is a relatively small city geographically, so the streets get pretty crowded. As you walk through different neighborhoods, you walk through different sectors of Israeli society. Walk through Gonen with the Kurds and Moroccan immigrants. German Colony means loud and wealthy anglos. Baka for the hip and trendy young secular set. And then there are the religious neighborhoods.
Tonight we walked through all these neighborhoods, and a few more in between.
