The ceasefire is over

I woke just after 6am to the pahom of artillery. A sign that things were back to ‘normal’, at least normal for this summer.
As I padded barefoot around the house I detected the addition of a distance rumble of fighting from inside Lebanon. Mid-morning I was hanging laundry out the window of my utility room and heard the judder of heavy machine gun fire. War was raging just a few miles across the border.

The sirens sounded and I called for my children to get in the security room. The siren is new, before we were expected to stay inside all the time. Now it sounds every so often - every time a barrage of missiles is spotted heading in Israel’s direction, I assume. It is instead of the guy from the municipality driving round making unintelligible announcements over a megaphone.

I joined the children in the room, gave my daughter some math worksheets and practised English reading with my son. Then I read to him a bit. I read from picture books thinking that when I asked questions he could guess the vocabulary from the pictures rather than struggling with the reading. However I discovered that unlike his sister, who has developed a relatively wide English vocabulary through chatting with my mother, my son doesn’t immediately remember such words as candle or flag so he ‘cheats’ by reading the caption! Strangely enough he did remember the word for juggler.
Really I shouldn’t be surprised - his vocabulary also includes ‘income tax’ and ‘house repairs’ as his acquirement of English reading skills has been driven by his urge to read the ‘Chance’ and ‘Community Chest’ cards in Monopoly, at present his favourite game.

After while my father-in-law phoned to ask how we are. I assured him we are safe. He told my mother-in-law came back for a few days to work but the renewed bombardment is not to her liking and he is taking both her and her mother back to Tel Aviv.

I made lunch for the children and while they were eating remembered that our pet guinea needed to have his cage cleaned. I took apart the cage and allowed him to wander round our sitting-room with my children. I went to empty all the dirty litter from the bottom of the cage straight into the communal skip-sized rubbish bin which crouches at the roadside about a dozen strides away from our front entrance. As I stepped outside there was a loud crack above my head – definitely not outgoing artillery fire. I checked the sky for falling shrapnel and waited awhile, debating whether I wanted to leave smelly guinea pig litter in the house. After a minute of quiet I trotted up to the large bin and upturned the cage bottom. As I smacked it against the side of the bin there was another loud crack. I decided to forgo a thorough cleaning and trotted back to the flat, sluicing the last few remains of dirty sawdust into the toilet.

Throughout the afternoon I having been listening to podcasts (to distract me) and scanning the news(to keep me updated) with the pahroom, pahroom of a war going on in the background and the occasional wail of sirens. My eardrums are numb with the incessant surges in air pressure and on hearing the first rising tone of the wail my children automatically rush to the security room. I check Ynet to see where all the katuyshas have fallen.

Later

My children have given me a handwritten invitation to a performance. Their little bodies maybe confined to 7msqr of security room but their imaginations are not. The sirens have gone off three times within the last half hour and there is no TV within our security room.

At first I lay on the sofa until there was a loud boom above us, which shook the whole house. I joined the children in the security room and even when I stepped back to the computer I reiterated that they were to stay there until further notice.

The rumbling in the background is like an extremely aggressive thunderstorm and although there have been a couple more forceful bangs there is no ‘whoosh’ to signify a landing nearby.

My husband has just phoned from the army to check we are OK. They had a short break and he heard there were civilian causalities. I refresh the page I was looking at and see that 6 people have been killed - 3 in Acco where my husband was brought up. His parents and brother still live there so I give them a ring. They are unhurt though they think one kutuysha landed near my brother-in-law’s house. My mother-in-law worked for a few hours but has come to gather a few things before they set out for Tel Aviv.

It has quietened down a bit and I can hear a few cars go past outside.

And now I have performance to attend.

ES