a postcard

Ode to dumps

My voice still as shaky as you remember, yet full of enthusiastic nostalgia and melancholy, I hum along to "The Ballad of Mary and Rosemary" as it plays in my head. Tonight I watch the dusk, and with it the end of Shabbat, over the glowing hills and holes of the dirt lot dump behind my mother's house. An elegantly trashy palm tree is silhouetted against the dusty peach sunset. I feel strangely safe at dumps and this particular one is mostly rubble from unfinished or demolished houses - cinder blocks, rusty rods, tiles. Closer to the houses, piles burnt plastic, pieces of outdated household appliances and naked Barbies with selectively remaining limbs line the hems of the field. A landscape striking me as another planet, or a movie set, especially when entering in from the paved and fenced suburbia. But this must be the secret subconscious of our world and it's abandoned charred grace stands as almost more natural than a forest of a lake. It's a history book, a memoir, a museum, a backseat, an arena. It's the scarred surface on the moon, innocent of its disfigurement, ominous, beautiful. I'll be in Israel for a few months learning how to walk (and then may be take some dance classes).

love,

anya