There is a war raging outside my front door but life can be very dull.
There is nothing to do but watch television repeating itself hour after hour. Everything is happening around me while I am forced to stay at home.
I walk with my dog Shandy for several walks every day. Those walks are the day’s highlights.
Esther is with me and that is best. I’d hate to worry about what is happening to her as she travels the roads from one workplace to another.
Esther is climbing the walls and would love to return to work. She had been informed that the Maccabi health plan would reopen its offices for a few hours each day. On Saturday evening she received an announcement that the return to normality would be postponed till some time in the future.
Life would be a lot better if we only knew how long the tension will last or what outcome we can hope for. In the meantime we watch the repetitive news itself. There was a time when I thought normalcy was boring. Now, I look forward to it.
Nahariya is the largest town in our area; approximately 50,000 people live there. Hizballah rockets pounded Nahariya and surrounding communities yesterday. My friend Bracha who lives next to Nahariya was frightened. She didn’t want to leave but it was scary to stay so I invited Bracha to come to Adamit.
It seemed to be the perfect solution for her fears and our boredom. With Bracha’s company, the day went by quickly. It is a quirk of our current situation that it is actually calmer and safer to be where I live, on the border, than where Bracha lives. For one day I removed her from the front lines.
Bracha is a dog lover with two dogs that had to come with her. As we were on our way to my home, we passed a new artillery base that just had to open fire as we were passing in front of it. Her two dogs were so scared that they tried to jump through the front window and run ahead of us.
Bracha had been hesitant. She doesn’t drive so I went to pick her up and she didn’t want me driving down there when it could be dangerous.
It was a fantastic drive. The roads were empty like they used to be at three in the morning, thirty years ago. It made me feel that I had won a prize to be able to drive the empty roads. I had to pinch myself to remember why they are abandoned. Almost everybody has left for the south.
Nahariya, Shlomi and other communities are 90 percent empty. Other towns in the north are also empty.
International news reports describe the refugees that have left their homes in Lebanon. They are talking about hundreds of thousands of refugees and what a shame it is. If they were to be conscientious about their reporting they would describe that at least the same number of civilians have been made to flee their homes in Israel. It might be preferable to be an Israeli refugee than a Lebanese refugee but the truth of the matter is that there may be more refugees in Israel than in Lebanon, but nobody is reporting the fact.
Returning to the subject of Israeli roads: Many people complain about them, the way they are designed and the way they are maintained. The truth is that the problem with Israeli roads is that they are full of Israeli drivers.
There really are no problems with the roads when they are empty. I felt free to exceed the speed limit as I had the feeling that the traffic cops were probably busy with more important matters than catching up to me.
People familiar with my driving may believe that I never drive without exceeding the speed limit but this time I was able to drive quickly without a guilty conscience.
I sped with a clean conscience on empty roads because Israelis have fled to the south and nobody knows about this because the news dwells only on Lebanese refugees.
