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Group Writing: Beauty
I am not a very emotional person, and tears for me are unusual, almost non-existent. But last week, in utter frustration, I wept.
My daughter wanted a cement path from my door to her steps, and we hired Mordechai to do the work. I have to say, he is honest, but he’ll tell you he is coming to do the work on a certain day, and then he disappears for two months. So today, he showed up with a couple of workers to do the path, and it was lovely, very professional, and will be a big help when the winter rains hit.
There was one problem: the new path goes around the outside edge of my deck, my precious, wonderful deck, a gift from my other daughter and her husband. I spent a week of mornings treating the wood floor and the rather complicated railing with Bondex. It was a lot of work, especially the railing, and it looked…beautiful.
Then the workers sprayed wet cement all over the place, marring the railing and the deck itself.
I was furious. And I sat down and wept. I took a floor shmattah and wiped it down as best I could, but the dusty cement marks remained. I will have to sand down the whole thing and re-do it if I want it to look right — and I do, oh yes, I do. My granddaughter calls me “Bad Words Grandma” and I hope she understands that bad words were invented for times like this.
But, what is it about this place, I tearfully raged. I have never known any Israeli workmen to even consider putting down a drop cloth. You get somebody to paint your walls, and you spend hours scraping up the paint drips from the floor tiles. And then, there’s my precious, beautiful deck…
I know, perfectly well, that a mere deck doesn’t matter much. Keep it in perspective, I told myself. It’s only a matter of re-doing the Bondex. An extra coat will be good before the winter rains arrive.
But here’s the thing: when my family was planning to make aliyah (immigrate to Israel), our friend Parvati, who had been at the moshav told us, “what the place lacks is beauty” and oh, what a truth that was.
When we arrived at the end of February 1980, there had been weeks of rain, and the whole place was a sea of mud. For a couple of months we lived in the house of friends who were in the States. There was a wood stove, but no fuel. We slept in our clothes in sleeping bags. During heavy rains, the windows leaked. One stepped out of bed into a puddle. Our friends had a washing machine, but it stopped working and I found myself washing everything by hand until we could get it repaired. I was secretly grateful for having grown up in a family which had not for an instant forgotten the Great Depression, and hence I had learned how to “make do” with very little.
The community had never gotten on its feet economically. It was a moshav shitufi — the businesses were held in common, and members were assigned work hours in the various endeavors. We received a small monthly stipend that was below the national poverty level. We did our food shopping on Wednesdays at the community store, an oddly depressing business. On Tuesdays, I rarely joined the women took the early bus into Lod to shop at the famous weekly shuk, sharing a taxi back to the moshav. The quality of the vegetables in Lod was better, and one could buy all kinds of household items, cheap clothing, and cloth brought up from Gaza by Arab traders who went from town shuk to town shuk each week, until the intifadas put an end to it.
Once we were accepted as members, we moved into a house that had been previously occupied by a family with three active boys. It took several years before we could afford to repair the walls from kid damage and apply fresh whitewash (these were not major renovations; we just didn’t have the money for much besides food and clothing and school supplies). I found it enormously depressing to live there, but there were some compensations, if one opened one’s eyes.
In the Israeli winter there are astonishingly beautiful wildflowers — the vibrant red kalanit (anemone) and King Solomon’s Crown, found all over the place. In the rains, the country turns green and softens. My heart lifted the first time I saw a hoopoe and didn’t know what it was, and as spring got into gear, my neighbor pointed to the storks circling overhead to gain height and flying northward at a surprisingly rapid pace. Summer approached with globe thistles and capers, but all too soon, things dried up, passing into a golden, California-like summer, albeit not quite as hot as Death Valley.
In the early years many families had managed to plant fruit trees, and some had decent gardens, but our own yard had a thin layer of poor dirt, and for a couple of years we couldn’t even afford basic tools for gardening. I had a black thumb anyway, and David’s interests were clearly elsewhere. Some of our neighbors thought of themselves as hippies “getting back to the land,” and I laughed at them. I had relatives who were farmers, and had a good idea of what it took to live on the land, even if our animals were goats and sheep rather than cows.
It took many years, and the end of the communist shituf before the moshav members were able to earn their livings. We eventually had telephones (!) and a few cars. In 1980 there had been only a Dodge van for delivering moshav products, and one (rich!) family had a Peugeot “tender” — a kind of pickup truck with a covered back and pull-down seats. In 1982, my husband and I divorced, and as a single parent supporting two children, I worked hard, not only in the moshav businesses, but I was also on call at all hours as the community nurse. With the end of the shituf in 1985, I was able to work outside the moshav and eventually got an interesting and challenging job at the university.
Looking back on the hardships, and appreciating how far we have all come, through poverty, squabbles, and some genuine tragedies, I realize that back in San Francisco in 1979, Parvati’s assessment of the need for beauty were accurate. What I eventually realized is that the beauty of nature that I came to love is a gift of God, but that we also have a deep need to make our own beauties as well. The effort of repainting a room, of doing a bit of embroidery on a blouse, of watching the flowers we have planted ourselves come into bloom, is just as important as the thrill of seeing the first kalanit open up in the front yard. No matter how humble our creations, in this we participate in God’s own work of creation.
I have more or less made peace with my cement box of a house; I must resign myself to the fact that it faces north and will never have enough light. The deck, my lovely deck, is like an extra room with afternoon light and a sense of spaciousness I have always longed for. I have a small garden. But how often I have longed to create my own small bits of beauty, even though I am indeed grateful for the wildflowers, the seasonal birds, and eating breakfast on the deck while it’s still cool in the mornings, and waiting in anticipation for winter when I can sit outside and watch the rain fall.
Published in Group Writing
Outstanding line.
Love Yer post.
If they did this, they weren’t professionals.
What a gorgeous post, so well written, so deeply felt! I’ve never been able to talk my wife into visiting Israel, but this post is like a perfect diorama!
Beautiful essay.
Reminds me of an apartment I signed a lease for pre-renovation and moved into post-renovation. There were numerous ways the work fell short of what I was led to expect, but the spray-on popcorn (unevenly) covering every available surface was maybe the most noticeable. It was as if the guy taped off the windows, stood in the center of the room, turned the sprayer on and started flailing around. I shook my head when I checked out the closet and found the light bulb in there half-coated in the stuff (still functioning).
Sorry about your deck, and thanks for a beautiful post!
This conversation is part of a Group Writing series with the theme “Beauty”, planned for the whole month of August. If you follow this link, you can see the links to other August posts, which will be updated as the month goes on. While you’re there, please sign up! There’s plenty of room.
I really enjoyed this essay, thank you.
May I suggest you consider putting out your own drop cloths the next time you have workers at your place? My dear husband is very careful about taping and protecting structures and things he cares about before the workers arrive, and we’ve found it to be the solution to his distress.
Little My, it seems that you recognize the blessings and the frustrations of Israel with an effort to find a balance between the two. I admire that effort, and I know that it would be very difficult for me to come to terms. But life is about beauty, not necessarily conveniences, and I appreciate your efforts to continue to open to the beauty that is there.
How completely beautiful :)
I bought my first home in March. A month ago, my “neighbor” cut down nearly two acres of trees next to my lot. Now they started construction on a new house, estimated time to completion 8-12 months. (And we know that all building projects come in on time.) Late last week they dropped off a porta-potty for the construction workers and placed it right on my property line within a couple dozen feet of my deck. Anyone want to come over for a cookout?
There is something so very beautiful about how a person builds their own daled amos, caring about making their personal world as perfect as they can.
To me, this post sums up most human relationships: the other people never care as much about the things that matter to us as much as we do. But we are supposed to try.
The verse in the middle of the Torah (the location marks it as the primary commandment) makes it as plain as day (Lev. 19:18):
“Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
An absolutely spot on idea!! And I should have thought of it, to be sure — although any drop cloths I have would consist of my bed linens.
One problem, however, is not knowing when the workers will show up, which might be any time convenient to themselves. There is an actual law in this country that certain services (washing machine repair, deliveries) have to give you a time range in which they plan to appear, and there are penalties if they don’t show up.
In this case, I did not realize they were having a truck deliver the cement and spray it all over, and the disaster happened while I was in my office trying to edit someone’s Ph.D. diss. <sigh>
There is an old Israeli attitude about which I could rant for several minutes: In Hebrew it is “Mah?! Ani lo freier!” which could roughly be translated “What?! You think I’ll do something for nothing??!!”
In other words, Hey, I’m here to do the work; you can clean up and pick up my cigarette butts yourself when I’m gone. Can you put out some cold water and cups and get us a felafel for lunch? Do you have coffee?
The Israeli writer Ephraim Kishon, of blessed memory, wrote a lot about such attitudes. That he maintained a sense of humor about it wins my everlasting admiration.
On the 23rd, the university closes for ten days, so I’d better go buy some more Bondex for Household Maintenance Week.