A few months ago, in an attempt to make up for lost time and correspondence, I wrote an epic of an email to my friend, Beth, an artist, a dreamer, and an adventurer, and described to her my home in Ramat Hasharon, Israel. At the time, we were living in a basement apartment of a private family home, belonging to a family, whose lives we were quite acquainted with due to our close proximity. I wrote to her how despite being in the basement, we did have windows and my favorite one was at the top of the stairs leading out of the apartment. From my favorite blue recliner – located in our living room – I had a view of this window, which gave me a small, but usually accurate indication of what was going on “surface level.” I could see from there a beautiful tree, which sometimes to our chagrin and sometimes to our amazement, housed hundreds of fruit bats. I’m reminded of the silly homemade craft (sometimes a rock on a string, sometimes just a string) that’s supposed to serve as a weather monitor: “If the rock is wet, it’s raining. If the rock is hot, it’s sunny, etc. etc.”
Anyways, this tree provided me with an idea of what the weather was outside: “If the tree is blowing in the wind, it’s windy, if it’s wet, it’s raining.”
Now, from my blue chair, currently located much more in the middle of things –in our new apartment on a main street in Tel Aviv – I don’t really need a tree to tell me what’s happening. I simply open the giant window in my living room, feel the weather, hear the traffic (and of course, a few birds determined to tweet their messages to one another despite the honking cars), and know what’s going on. After all, now we’re “above the ground people,” no snobbery intended.
From here, I can see a tree (two even!) the way I think they were supposed to be seen – not by humans of course, but by our flight-blessed friends, the birds. I left a small rug out to dry on the railing guarding our picture window and yesterday a bird decided it was a much nicer landing pad than the bare railing. I’m thinking about just leaving it there – just in case he visits again.
Of course, as one can imagine, Tel Aviv is not all about nature. We can also see from our window 3 tall skyscrapers, which at night are lit up. This is Nadav’s favorite view. Me, though, I think I’ll stick with the birds.
