Salakta, Tunisia
I’m finally back, jet-lagged after 24 hours of travel from Minneapolis through New York and Paris. I left Friday. Waking here yesterday, the overwhelming sense was of quietness and soft air.
It was Sunday morning at my friend’s summer house near the sea. She came to get me up and we went out to eat breakfast on the terrace in the shade. I could write about only the garden! We ate fresh green figs, picked from their tree, and fresh grapes from a vine. The little house is so beautiful, like a dream, simple, unfinished yet, but much further along than on my first visit almost two years ago. The rest of the family joined us—her husband, their three grown children, and the visiting daughter of a friend. We ate bread and chemiya (sesame cake) and drank dark coffee and spoke a jumble of English, Arabic, and French.
She took me up on the roof for a view before she went to the market. At the top of the stairs sits a solar collector, like a giant notepad. The light is so bright here, the latitude of Santa Fe and Carolina. To the east I could see the sea a short walk away, and to the west, the flat agricultural landscape.
The property is shaped like an L, surrounded by a white wall. The house and terrace are built into the corner. Between the gate from the street and the house is the driveway and a side yard that contains the fig tree and grapevine. It was this fig tree around which my friend’s architect husband planned everything else. Past the terrace is a space with seven small trees—almond and peach and lemon among them.
We ate a late lunch. I helped a little as mother and daughters prepared it—salade meshwaya, fresh tomato sauce, cucumber and tomato salad, grilled fish, a gorgeous green glass bowl of fruit—grapes, green figs, peaches—that the eldest daughter arranged. After that we drank strong mint tea, and then my friend laid a mat in the shade on the terrace and put me down for a nap. After the weeks of preparing for this trip, exhaustion of working for a year with hardly a break to save up vacation, squeezing in an Arabic class, the anxiety of research and packing for six weeks away, I am relieved to be here. Now the anxiety is for all the work to be done, wondering if I can make the connections I hope to make, if technology will work, if I will be up to all I have planned. Yet I feel the crazy American rush ebbing out of my muscles, lucky to be such a good friend’s care, lucky to stand beneath a fig tree and smell the sweet fruit.
As I woke, the family was saying mid-afternoon prayer on the terrace, facing the gate beyond the fig tree, the direction of Mecca. Father and son stood in front in white, mother in dark green, two of the young women in black and white. Under the clear blue sky, the breeze blew their robes.
Past midnight, last thing, I went up on the roof and saw the old crescent moon, orange above the eastern horizon. That old moon will vanish this week, and when the new moon comes, it will be Ramadan.
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