Shrivelled lemons

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I know this is a good philosophy. But there are times when the lemon tree's leaves look dry and crispy and the lemons dark yellow and shrivelled. And today was one of those days. 

After a New Year's Eve full of friendship and merriment, and two weeks spent rafting on a wine river of farewells, the crash was bound to happen. It has been a weekend and half  week of weeping. With a dry throat, sore back and a nausea - all a throwback from the boarding school tri-monthly pack-a-thon, our soundscape has been the noise of unhappy suitcase zips and a wailing Lozenge and Rashimi, and dare I say, myself. It was Nayara the Brazilian cleaner who set me off. All she did was stand at the ironing board and say, 'I'm going to miss my boys' and out spouted the tears which have barely stopped. There have been rare moments of mirth such as Rashimi lifting up the Tshirt of the waitress with a greasy mozarella hand when we went for pizza in the pub, saying 'tickle tickle' on her tummy, and the Lozenge saying, 'are we finally going to Jordan today?' But other than that. Mostly weeping.

Every two hours J has had to run out and buy another suitcase from the shop down the road, and when he gets back, log onto the Orange Purgatory to book another 30 kilos on our luggage allowance to avoid an angry moment with an Orange Ogress. (This should really be a plug for cheap flights to come and see us. Yes, EasyJet flies to Amman).

An ever emptying house has been unsettling for the little people in our life. Similar to the dog hopping in the back of the car when you're filling it with luggage, the Lozenge's sticky hand been attached to mine for 12 hours a day, trotting by my side like a shaggy Shetland show pony in the ring, even up and down stairs or to the shop.  His games have been all about packing. So when I mumbled to J that I was sure the 20 adaptor plugs I'd ordered on Amazon had been in that pile there, and J took zero responsibility for its disappearance, I realised the packing dwarf had been at work, and discovered all 20 plugs, neatly zipped up in the monkey backpack. Leave something lying about. It'll get packed. 

The problem is, we're not leaving London because we don't like it. And after three years of growing some baby snowdrop roots here, it already feels very painful to rip them up. Our neighbours for one, have been some of those types you don't get the opportunity to live next to often. As you can see from this little photo film. It's only 6 minutes. And these two men really are two pieces of treasure one door down. 

https://vimeo.com/57914767

So it's been because of all this, that I've wondered to myself why exactly we're going to all this trouble to uproot a happy, already interesting life, to learn one of the world's hardest languages, and live in one of the world's most unsettled regions. Honestly, we must be crazy. What on earth are we doing? Why, oh why, did we decide to do this?

Yesterday we sat at home in the dying afternoon light of a winter afternoon eating lamb and rice with our Arabic teachers. Two of the ladies are from Syria and and I have always marvelled at how they stood at the white board, explaining five different plural formations to me, never giving away the pain they must be feeling about their homeland being ripped to shreds by internal hatreds. Never talking unless prompted about family members they wish they could rescue from it. And there they were in our sitting room eating and chatting away, bright and cheerful as ever, teaching the Lozenge some numbers and Arabic greetings, one of them expecting a first child, herself. 

Watching and laughing with them, it reminded me why we are doing all this. But the irony of heading to Amman, so close to all the turmoil in Damascus and beyond, as London is to Birmingham. So close and yet, still, so far. Who knows what the fate of Jordan will be as it sits in the doughnut hollow of relative tranquility, south of Palestine, West of Syria, North of Saudi Arabia. Who knows. Yet we at least have a home to come back to should it turn. We, for the moment, seem to be the lucky ones.

My doubts about what will happen when we get there also emerge at moments like these. (Having realised I was invincible and could survive on 4 hours sleep and red wine for ever - it was J that suggested gently that although I did have more juice in my batteries than most people he'd ever met, 'just don't forget to top them up every so often'). But the doubts emerge at times, for example when I realised that flying on the Orange Purgatory, you could have only one piece of handluggage each. Which meant I could either have my entire camera kit, or my bag full of nappies, beakers and wetwipes. So I can be a fully functioning me, or just a Mum. But not both. And my lenses can't go in the hold.

So we finished packing up, and got ready to leave, trying not to think too hard about those walls which had witnessed so much of our funny little fledgling family life. All the people coming in and out, and the eating and the drinking, and the sleeping and the not sleeping, the laughing the sobbing, the happy and the cross. Let's hope it all stays in there, I thought as I swung my huge pack on my back, and an equally rotund Rashimi under one arm and staggered to the taxi where J and Lozenge waited, shutting the door behind and hoping the next people would feel it all in these walls still.

Last week a Palestinian architect I interviewed told me he used to convince his clients he would take their house and make it a home, and it's the people in a house that make the home. This is what I'm hoping as we head off to re-plant our snowdrop roots in a strange place. And without the Lozenge or Rashimi noticing that I'm a little afraid.