Greetings from Israel. Mourning is an action here, "sitting" for seven days but with a complete infrastructure of receiving guests, visiting, morning and evening prayers, hospitality--provided by relatives other than immediate family (who are children/siblings/spouse)--grandkids like me are not "immediate" so we get to be hospitable, which is very lovely, but days are very long. People come who are uncles' friends, old classmates of my mom, second cousins I haven't seen since I was seven, and then of course the very familiar faces, although even since I was last here eighteen months ago some of my cousins have had more kids.
Everyone brings what they have within them at the moment. Some have tears. Some have memories and stories. Some have talk of politics or renewed religious feeling. Some have jokes, and it is good to see the mourners snorting with laughter. So many people have been here, I sometimes lose track of what happened on which day. Of course, my 24-hours journey with eleven-hour time hop with language switch probably augment that disorientation, since half the time I'm even on a different day than I would be back in AK. But with all the social fuss happening in the canopy outside the apartment, I keep expecting my grandmother to be inside, keep wanting to tell her "Do you know who was here? Do you know what they said?" My mom has expressed exactly the same feeling, and I suspect we're not alone in one way or another.
I don't even know which is more "home," here or Alaska. "Here" is more familiar in a rootsy lifelong way. Alaska is/was an incredible opportunity. When I figure it out, I'll post some pictures. The whole WiFi/data situation seems tertiary in urgency right now as cousins and other close relatives arrive constantly at erratic moments. Things will calm down a bit tomorrow. We think. So, but nonetheless, here is an HAWMC post.
Prompt:
If your health condition (or the health condition of a loved one!) was an animal, what would it be? Is it a real animal or make believe? I thought of lemmings, cascade of falling off a cliff, but I don't think I am legion enough to be lemmings all by myself.
Before lemmings, I thought of birds. Migratory birds, to be precise. But the migratory bird that is anorexia/bipolar is an eccentric migrant. She will fly to the far north in the spring when she could be eating early cherries, and eke along in the north until right around when the berries ripen, and then fly for a sojourn to the desert. She has one wing much stronger than the other, which causes her to fly in circles some. But it's not always the same wing that's stronger. Sometimes she migrates many times in a year; other times she stays in one place, sunk down in the ground, for a whole year at a time. Sometimes she dresses up to join the crowd, leading with her strong wing. But the weak wing is always pulling her in to a center that may not be her own.
When she visits her home-place, where everything tastes better, she waits and waits, gets hungry, eats, feels sick, hates herself for feeling sick from the food of this special place, but still eyes the persimmons that are a miracle of April, the exquisite dried apricots from Uzbekistan, the green powder she brought with her as a taste of her own better self, is disturbed at the back of her nauseous mind by questioning thoughts about the next time to eat, wishes she had the strength of wings and character never to eat again, to become her own totem cicada, sing all day, and dissolve at sundown into a leaf-skeleton of abandoned beauty.
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