memories in present tense

Tonight, Daniel, Declan, Petra, and I tried out a faux pan-Asian restaurant that opened on Moriya Street to mark Petra's first birthday and the day that Declan became a big brother. Petra is currently under the haze of a low-grade fever (day two now) and ate 50% of the food I placed before her while chucking the other half to the restaurant floor. Declan was surprisingly receptive to the food, before being admonished by a waitstaff to stop abusing the bamboo displays.

Looking across Moriya Street from the window by our table, I saw the corner flower shop that I passed by almost every day when we first moved to Haifa. The outdoor flower displays lead to a side street upon which sits the small Supersal makolet that was our source of groceries for the first two months of our life in Israel. It turned out to be the most expensive place to shop for food, and I soon started relying on other places like the Talpiot shuk, the Mega by the Cinemathique, the larger Supersal near Gan HaEm, the yarkan at Paris Square, Nizat Haduvdevan, the pseudo-shuks at Romema and by the front entrance of Superpharm on Friday mornings, the home delivery system of an organic farm... and settling now, for the most part, on Eco Meshek, another organic farm which also does home deliveries--with greater freedom to select produce I would actually eat (no more fennel/anise, thanks).

I've seen Eco Meshek's label on goat milk yogurts at Nizat Haduvdevan (an organic produce/product store that I'd stared at unseeingly for a year, as I waited across the street at the Merkaz Ziv bus stop that served as my transfer point to the Technion...before I finally realized what the cherry sign was and got a membership). I didn't think to visit Eco Meshek's website--posted on all its dairy products--to understand its operations more fully; I'm glad I finally know about its produce side upon the recommendation of another mom. Thankfully she wasn't satisfied with the organic produce box I've been settling with, and kept looking until she tried out this farm.  I appreciated my old farm for several reasons, but this one is definitely even better.

Grocery shopping in Israel is such an exploration, with prices and quality that can vary spectacularly in range. After one and a half years, I finally feel somewhat satisfied with my degree of knowledge on the ins-and-outs of where to get the best price for the best quality of food items. And I also realized after perusing the receipt for this week's Eco Meshek delivery, that I could essentially read and understand the whole list written in Hebrew. What a psychological difference from when it used to take me 45 minutes of excruciating matching and careful notations to decipher every supermarket receipt in order to make sure all the charges were made correctly. It's kind of silly how accomplished I feel at so small an improvement.

Look, Ma -- No hands!

Then, while waiting at a stoplight on our walk home, a friend stuck his head out of his van as traffic flowed past us and yelled, "Hey!" We almost always bump into people we know when Daniel and I walk near our neighborhood with the kids nowadays. And I enjoyed seeing a common quality in Israel as we stopped by Gan Shmuel before returning all the way home--older kids taking great interest and delight in playing with Declan up and down the playground structures. They seemed very disappointed when I said we had to leave, and repeatedly waved goodbye to Declan who was equally sad to go.

All of these things, tonight, made me feel like this place is starting to be my home. These are the things I will remember with nostalgia when we must be uprooted and sent off to elsewhere again.