Diary of a Fall
It’s a funny thing, how those moments that change your life slip up on you, discordant chords in the rhythm of life, that inflate into a storm. Putting my barbie dolls in their drawer, coming downstairs for supper, my parents telling me, happily, like it’s a good thing, that we will be making Aliyah to Israel in the spring time. As if that didn’t mean leaving my home, with the rose bushes in the front lawn where I posed every year in my birthday dress, and the pair of trees in the back where my big brother kept promising to build me a tree house when he came home from Yeshiva, and the ancient trampoline where I could lie spread eagled and count the clouds, the weedy grass where I picked daisies in the summer, the shul where the old man gave me raisins in a red Sun-Maid box. As if Aliyah didn’t mean leaving my friends, the complicated school yard games we had been leading since before we could remember, of who’s-who’s best friend, and hide and seek, fairies and witches, and runnin