Well, I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain the difference between what it felt like to be in Israel as a hugely naive 21-year-old with a tabula-rasa life and a yen for the ancient, and being in Israel as a slightly less naive almost-28-year old with a few small writings on her page and an expanded sense of what ancient really means, and I realized that the task is a little like attempting to describe last night’s dream to someone else—it’s not so much that you can’t find the words. It’s that halfway through the telling you realize no one, really, is as anywhere near as interested in your dreams as you.

If you want, I’ll still talk to you about it over a glass of rum someday soon though. Also, here is the short version: last time, if an Israeli was rude to me it made me chuckle and wax lyrical about how living in close proximity to horror and death meant that they chose to shun meaningless social niceties in favor of getting right down to the important business of real life. This time, if an Israeli was rude to me it made me think they were an annoying jackass.

(However, I still like rude Israelis a hundred times better than the people who ride the T in Boston. And an Israeli alpaca sneezed in my face, and I forgave it. So, you know. There’s still some magic left.)

P.S. In other news, it finally snowed! Pretty, fine, dry flakes of the kind that I once would have stuck my tongue out to catch and imagined as stars falling down out of the sky. Sadly, there is no magic left in Boston winters.

See, my Utata friends are not just figments of my imagination. I saw two of them yesterday, and boy are they pretty.

Steph…

…and Liz.

The afternoon I landed in Israel in 2000 I called Avi from the airport. “When you take a cab,” he said, “sit in the front seat. This is a democratic country.”

I wasn’t sure how the former followed from the latter, but in any case my driver decided to ferry a friend of his as well, so they chatted away in the front while I stared out the window at the palm trees and the yellow dust. I have no idea why I wasn’t nervous, not even a little, about what lay ahead. I’d never been anywhere in the Middle East before. I didn’t know a soul in the entire country except for Avi, who was going to be rather busy being a soldier most of the time. I’d had a year of Hebrew by then and I felt steadied by the words I held in my hat, but I’d never even read a book about Israel. It wasn’t much more than a name on the radio to me—a little, but not much. A thin thread of language, music and love was the only thing connecting me to the land that day. Shouldn’t I have been worried about whether that would be enough to anchor me over the next eight months? Shouldn’t I have wondered whether I was even going to like it there?

I cannot begin to tell you why, but I felt immeasurably confident. Wholly free. I knew I was going to like it. I just knew.

On the way into Jerusalem the sky broke open into a light storm, and my driver and his friend broke into delighted exclamations. “Maybe it’s not so nice for you on your first day, but we need the rain, you know?” they said, turning around to beam at me and make sure I understood why they were so happy. Maybe that was the beginning of it, their rich satisfaction over the rain. It felt like a door was opening, and behind it all that was good would be better. Whether or not that also meant all that was bad would be worse, I didn’t care. I twinkled back at them. The rain came down. And when I stepped out of the taxi, it was onto wet Jerusalem stone, slippery with promises.

I’m still very sleepy and mulling things over, so the big picture chat about Israel is going to have to wait a bit. For now here are a few little pictures (and perhaps one or two tiny little stories, too, behind a click).

Remember that one time we came back from Thailand and I packed my house keys in the bag I checked (which was lost somewhere in between Singapore and Bangkok)? Remember how it was winter and Ross had no winter coat or shoes and we had nowhere to go and we had to call Peter so he could take us in out of the cold and serve us hot tea until one of my housemates came home and opened the door for us? And then remember how, hours and hours later, I finally realized the keys were actually in my camera bag all along?

No, I didn’t do that again this time—it’s just that I think I misplaced my key to the past, and I’m getting the feeling someone’s gone and changed the lock on me, anyway.

But in case you were wondering, the place is just as beautiful as it ever was. Maybe more. And my friends are just as beautiful as they ever were. Much more.

And I can still taste the tomatoes.

We’ll talk soon, lovelies. G’night.

Typically I like to leave you with a pretty, soothing picture to look at when I go away, but this time I decided that wasn’t good enough—no, not for you precious few. So this time I am leaving someone with you who I know will watch over you with great care:

I’m off to work and then it’s straight to the airport. I’ll be on holy ground by the morrow. See you in 10 days!

…I’d tell you the reason my entire bag smells like saag paneer…

…I’d describe the crazy-cool children’s literature-themed Christmas tree I saw today, and possibly also the unbelievably delicious cheese puffs I ate while I sat looking at it…

…I’d explain what makes my colleague Angel’s Amazon parrot really angry…

…I’d list the songs Ben played me tonight that I did not like….

….and the ones I did (which would be a lot quicker)…

…I’d confess to you the horrible thing I said about my upstairs neighbor last night, while she was within earshot, just because I was tired. It wasn’t even true…

…and I’d give you a play-by-play of the process of untwisting Jenn’s braids, which is what I was doing when I said the horrible thing.

Since I have to sleep, though, I’ll just show you this…

and direct you to a few more pictures.