Week in Seven Words #509

This covers the week of 10/20/19 - 10/26/19.

campus
Her campus is embedded into a hillside. She leads us up and down flights of stairs and shows us her favorite corners, like a nook in the library or a bench on a quiet lawn. In different corners, lemon, grapefruit, and olive trees grow.

citadel
A golden light has settled on the hill. On the remnants of a fortress, a chunky, plastic playground has sprung up.

colliding
I walk among peach-colored blossoms, and geese waggling their butts, and cats dozing in high grass. A booming noise, like the sound of car meeting concrete, ruptures the afternoon. It turns out not to be car-on-concrete, but one car glancing against the other, with thankfully no one hurt, though one adult is shouting and a baby is wailing.

illuminating
The sun presses like a warm hand on my arm and head. When the pressure gets to be too much, I find refuge in the scented shade of the garden. Later, we slip into the museum, which is laid out brilliantly, especially its archaeology wing. From room to room, with detours into adjacent civilizations, it's easy to follow the historical timeline.

purity
Parts of the day are marked by clean air, and clean, sharp flavors and scents. In the morning, we're in a forest with evergreens, and the purity of the air is stunning. Later in the day, I drink a rich, foamy, tart, sweet juice of pomegranate and red apple. Towards evening, we stop in a shaded yard. The air is cool, and the flowers spray from the shrubbery as from a fountain.

share
Dinner is served on many small plates, which we pass from one person to another while helping ourselves to dollops. The conversation gushes along, and into it we pack many missed conversations from over the years. Afterwards, we walk along broad, well-lit, empty streets.

whisking
The ceiling fan in the bedroom whisks air over me cool as milk.

Week in Seven Words #508

This covers the week of 10/13/19 - 10/19/19.

fittingly
Her cooked vegetables are in autumn colors: moist purples, tender shades of orange and gold.

luminosity
The windows of the plane are tinted, so that the clouds look like they're dipped in blue. Soon, the plane tilts and soars over the water, which is all dark except for silken spills of light, like shifting dunes, where the clouds have cracked open to admit the sun.

memories
I show her a song sheet she gave me years ago. She sings quietly with tears in her eyes and says, "I came from a warm household. Poor, but warm."

parakeets
There are wild parakeets in the park. They look like bright, chattering leaves that have peeled away from their home trees and now go where they wish.

practicing
They arrive in homage to a religion they lightly practice. They feel that some traditions are worth preserving, at least for their kids.

revealing
Just because I use the expression "relatively small," she guesses that I have a research background.

weight
Two men – pot-bellied, slow, gentle, sure, with ruddy, cube-shaped heads – discuss weight loss. "You know," one says to the other, "losing 50 pounds is like strapping a sack of potatoes to you and walking around with it all day. It takes effort."

Recommending Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz

Tel Ilan, a pioneer village, already a century old, was surrounded by fields and orchards. Vineyards sprawled down the east-facing slopes. Almond trees lined the approach road. Tile roofs bathed in the thick greenery of ancient trees.

In Scenes from Village Life, Amos Oz opens windows into the lives of different characters living in a village in Israel. Many of the residents continue to operate farms, but the face of the village is changing. People have opened up restaurants and galleries and have leased out land. They're making a living from tenants or from visitors who come by each weekend to search for art, furniture, and other items of interest. Along with the external changes in the village, there are private transformations, unsettling and destabilizing occurrences experienced quietly.

These are some of the qualities of the book that stood out most:

- So many of the descriptions enfold you, the sensory details chosen with sensitivity, hitting the right notes ("A deep, wide silence lay on the garden...")

- In many of the episodes in the book, an absence is what brings people new insights or forces them to confront what they've been avoiding. A nephew who doesn't show up, a wife who disappears after leaving an ambiguous note... during each incident, the characters who remain behind discover something important about their lives, such as a truth they've ignored or denied.

- Characters probe at the limits of what they can understand about themselves, other people, or life. For instance, in one part of the novel, a man shines a flashlight under a bed. In this dark space, a teenager had previously killed himself. What does the flashlight illuminate? ("I had no further reason to turn my back on despair." Does despair still linger in that empty space in tangible form?)

- The novel captures the village's instability, not just in the way that personal relationships become unstable and unpredictable, but also in how the village has changed. Its connections to its farming days are weakening. The future is uncertain. Long-standing residents aren't sure what comes next in their own lives and for the community as a whole. At the same time, there's much that remains familiar. The things that haven't changed may accentuate everything that's different.

Week in Seven Words #507

This covers the week of 10/6/19 - 10/12/19.

bullet
In an old spiral notebook, I start a bullet journal, and so far it's working well. The method at first seems cumbersome, but in practice it's pretty easy to use, and there's no need to make it fancy.

commercial
It's a home with an aggressive commercial quality, like the set for an ad. There's little that's personal in it.

entorhinal
Her mind is ravaged by dementia, so she doesn't realize she's at a Yom Kippur service. She thinks it's some kind of simcha, like a wedding party. "I can't dance," she keeps saying. "Oh, there's the wall," she cries, her fingers tracing the mechitza.

hunting
Searching for a hat in a department store. Racks and racks of clothes, people rifling humorlessly, each item subjected to sharp inspection.

richness
Golden chrysanthemums, a golden haze to the afternoon.

space
Praying part of the time outdoors, alone, in the cool air.

whiff
The movie theater lobby smells like a dank basement toilet. The movie itself is like an air freshener. Beyond being light and pleasant, it doesn't leave a strong impression on me. What I remember more strongly is the walk afterwards, late into the evening.

Week in Seven Words #506

This covers the week of 9/29/19 - 10/5/19.

autumnal
The leaves are turning a spangly orange and gold. Coolness is working its way into the warmth of the day.

kindly
I respect how attentive she is to other people. She pauses in the middle of praying to make sure someone has a seat, and to soothe an elderly lady who thinks she's been transported to a date decades earlier.

mailing
The kids find a way to amuse themselves by chucking their shoes through a hole in the net. "Special delivery!" they shout.

multitask
When I return, I find her asleep on the couch with her fingers still suspended in front of her, her freshly painted nails drying. As good a time as any to catch up on some sleep.

pained
She's seized by moments of querulousness, and it's best to let them slide. Her hours are often pinched with pain, and one day washes into another.

purpose
What I touch I must try to make good.

salvaging
It's impossible to start over completely, he says with dimmed eyes, but you do the best you can.

Week in Seven Words #505

This covers the week of 9/22/19 - 9/28/19.

cramps
Curled up on the couch with intense cramping, waiting for the OTC painkiller to kick in. My feet swivel in time to the pulses of pain, and I try to let the murder mystery novel I'm reading distract me.

curiosity
She shows an interest in Revolutionary-era Boston, after I show her an image of Samuel Adams beer.

drub
In the back room of the board game cafe, the wall is scuffed and dented. A small sign hangs on it, asking customers not to kick it or bang on it with their fists.

hoard
I find a notebook for her, in light blue and decorated with hot air balloons, in which she'll probably want to write the poems and song lyrics she isn't yet ready to share with anyone.

tidying
I clean my shoes and donate some boots, towels, and pillow cases. Under the couch, I find dust clumps that look like small gray wigs.

unquiet
She's trying to find a chair, or configuration of chairs, that will suit her. She slides from one to the other. She chooses a middle seat, before scrambling back to settle against the wall. I don't think she'll find anything she likes, because the discomfort is embedded in her mind. She can't uproot it by means of rearranging chairs.

unthinking
She's frustrated that they don't consider a cold to be an illness. They take no care to cover their mouths when they cough or sneeze.

Three Sherlock Holmes Stories to Read in Lockdown

This past weekend, I read a few Sherlock Holmes stories that I found strangely relaxing, even though at least one of them involves murder. Maybe because each story is like an orderly, manicured garden with well-defined paths. Holmes and Watson are ever the same, with Watson admiring the genius of his friend, and his friend saying that it's nothing at all, you just have to observe things. (In some cases, you also have to be able to distinguish between different kinds of cigar ash, topsoil, etc.) The endings aren't mystifying. Just take the route Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has laid out for you, and you'll be entertained.

(You can also amuse yourself imagining Holmes in lockdown. When not on a case, he enjoys being indoors, experimenting with chemicals, playing the violin, or getting a little coked up.)

All of these are from Sterling Publishing Co.'s volume, The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). You can also find the Adventures and the Memoirs online on Project Gutenberg. ("The Crooked Man" is in the Memoirs, and the last two stories in the Adventures.)

Title: The Crooked Man

Crookedness can refer to a physical characteristic or to a moral one. In this story, a man is dead after an argument with his wife, who has fainted away at the scene. There's also evidence that a third person was in the room. Holmes probes a little deeper and discovers a horrific betrayal from decades ago.

Title: A Scandal in Bohemia

Irene Adler is in this one, a woman who looks after herself capably and stays a step ahead of Holmes. Is she the villain of the story, or someone who has been wronged and is trying to protect herself? Holmes falters slightly in this one, I think because he bases his predictions on what a woman would typically do in Adler's situation, and she's unusual.

Title: The Speckled Band

This story involves a country house, a cruel stepfather, and an elaborate method of premeditated murder. What I liked most about it was the sense of dread that builds to the point where everything is revealed.