Because I can

[salinea]

I love it when my mother tells me of her childhood in Algeria. She lived just near the sea and they always go there to play. They lived in a building and their neighbors where French colons, other Jews, Arabs, Kabyles... every kind of people. They had to heat water to bath themselves and there were a common room where my grand mother used to wash clothes.
My grandfather didn't want her to have dolls so she played with pictures of girls cut from magazine and only at school. She went to a Maïmonide school for a long time, where her brother taught and she liked it because when the teacher wasn't there she could do classes.
She told me of the smell of Rhododendron, and the light and how every morning they ran to the beach, and on the evening they drops bucket of water on the balcon, sit down and chat with the neighbors' children.

It sounds like another world. In a way, it is.

Comments

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Oh, that must have been hard for her.
I didn't mention here the hardest stuff of my mother's past. The war of Algeria etc.

My grand parents weren't very keen on telling about the war either. I know my grandmother never forgave Slovakia, her mother countrie, for its collaboration with the nazis, and of course she lost several siblings and her parents to it. Most of what I know I was told by my parents. I do regret that I didn't talk more with my grandparents about it when they were alive.

I am sure that when you do have children you will find things to tell them. We might not realise it, but there's always been so many transformations around us of the world in the last twenty years.

And you could tell them about how you met Hitoshi and he chased after you half across the world :p