Running headlong into rain

It's hard to imagine all the ways weather.com can say it's going to rain: showers, storms, moisture, rainshowers, light rains, heavy rains, wind/rain, downpours. Basically it means it's going to rain all day--sometimes lighter and sometimes heavier. But yesterday morning it stopped completely (for a while) and the sun came out and Courtney snapped the photo below of the holly tree in our backyard. It's hard to tell by looking, but it was ablaze with sunlight and probably full of birds. Courtney took me on a walk to the covered bridge near our house to see the field that now is a pond with 40 or 50 mallards swimming in it. Ahhhh, the simple pleasures of winter. Snow is predicted all the way down to the valley floor in the next couple of days. That's fine but I would prefer that kind of weather wait until Aaron's here for his winter break four weeks from today. He's the one who wants snow and cold. He's planning to go skiing at Tahoe with kids and teachers from his school in January. It'll be his first time skiing. He's such a natural at sports--quick and agile--and I'll bet he picks it up right away.



And speaking of quick and agile, Ben is astonishing us each day with his new talents--grabbing hold of his feet and getting them almost into his mouth, flipping himself from back to front and front to back, setting his sights on something he wants to take hold of and doing it! Suddenly he is the master of his universe! He loves his johnny-jump-up so much. He throws himself back with reckless abandon and peels of laughter, and sometimes we worry that he's going to catapult himself right out of the thing. But so far, so good.



Oh, yeah, there's another new development in Ben's life--the addition of food. In the form of lukewarm, strained carrots, but he doesn't care. He acts like it's tiramisu. His mouth flies open whenever the spoon comes in his sight. The opposite of Maya and Aaron, who we had to trick into each mouthful.



Ben celebrated his half birthday on Thanksgiving with a big serving of mashed up sweet potatoes. We made lots of jokes about singing half of "Happy Birthday" and putting half a candle on half a slice of birthday cake. Lots of laughs and good food and a roaring fire in the wood stove in Maya and Eder's kitchen. And so much to be thankful of, though it's strange to have a holiday without Aaron around. One thing we usually only do when Aaron is with us is watch movies. When it's just me and Courtney, we're oftentimes at a meeting in the evening or reading/writing
or on our computers. Usually two hours seems too precious to give up but Maya has introduced us to Steve Martin movies and now we're on a roll. First was Father of the Bride, then The Housesitter (with Goldie Hawn) and last night was The Pink Panther. All winners.



I've named the photo above "Baby Bear in a Bucket". And the one below "Mimi Gets an Education While Ben Gets a Nap". I hope I don't grow to fit the shape of my chair by winter's end. It is the most heavenly snug place to read by the wood stove while the rain pitter patters outside. I just finished a great book Last Days of Babylon: The History of a Family, the Story of a Nation by Marina Benjamin. The author is an Iraqi Jew who grew up in London and never went to Iraq until 2004 when she went as a journalist (of all the danged awful times to go, not to mention extremely dangerous).




The book chronicles the history of several generations of her family in Baghdad, especially the women, and her grandmother's harrowing escape from Iraq in 1958 with her three children. Meanwhile the backdrop is the tumultuous story of the birth of Iraq as a nation and the historical ups and downs of a very significant Jewish community (1/3 the population of Baghdad) in a Muslim country. There were periods of tolerance and thriving and coexistence, but that all ended with the rise of Zionism. Jews had been in Baghdad for more than 1000 years before Islamic armies conquered Mesopotamia. In 1950 there were 130,000 Jews in Baghdad and by 2004, when Marina Benjamin went to document the lives of those remaining, there were 22. In 1951 alone 104,000 Jews were "denaturalized", their possessions confiscated by the government, their assets frozen, and they had been airlifted to Israel, where life in refugee camps awaited them. They were allowed to take with them several changes of winter clothes and summer clothes, a blanket per person and $400. Meanwhile the same thing was happening to the Palestinians. Of Palestine's 1.3 million Arabs, 800,000 were displaced by 1949 with Israel in possession of entire cities and hundreds of villages not planned as part of the Jewish state.

In Benjamin's view, in the 1940's and 1950's Iraq could have built a modern and inclusive sense of nationhood by giving the political minorities (such as the Shia) and the religious minorities (such as the Jews) a participatory role in forming the national culture. But the country remained dominated by tribal elite who imposed monolithic nationalism on everyone else. She says the Iraqi people repeatedly rejected political liberalism in favor of nationalism and militarism in reaction to the lies of colonialism. (The British repeatedly pretended they were turning the country over to the Iraqis but kept tight control of everything--sound familiar?)

I keep thinking of that old saying about if we paid closer attention to history we wouldn't be forced to repeat it. I'm vowing to do my part this winter. See you at the library!

Thanks for reading this and hope you're warm and snug,

Valori