It's more difficult to convince Lula to eat vegetables than it was EB. Chabayev (as A has dubbed Lula's alter ego the Bulgarian wrestling coach) insists on all things on her way. She's also squeamish about texture: anything firmer than applesauce is suspect. Thus I was bowled over to find her eating the squishy detritus from the juicer straight out of the trash can the other day.
School... a tough week last week (the principal to me on the stairs: “She cried today. Really cried.”) but each day is a bit better. I still feel like it's rehearsal, though, each day a trial run. Today they said she wept again early in the day but when I arrived to get her, she begged to stay.
Freezing weather kept us inside this apartment all weekend long, but with our spring travel plans for Spain falling into place, I feel immune to cabin fever. This hibernation season, and the vague disturbing awareness of a grim struggle for survival happening out in the streets, is offset by anticipation (my favorite pastime) – sandals on sun-warmed paving stones, the dust trail made by a car on the opposite dry hill, the wiggling diamonds of light that hover around a turquoise swimming pool, gnarled olive trees whose leaves are silver underneath.
Incredible dream last night -- bombs dropped from planes destroyed a magnificent domed building -- train station? palace? -- in which we and many other refugees (?) had taken shelter. I replayed the collapse of the great dome several times, testing how far from the exit we would have had to be in order to escape being crushed, whether the underground kitchen and storage rooms would have been safer, whether we might have negotiated a place on the small Vietnamese diplomatic boat that was ferrying a lucky few to safety. In particular I remember families camped in the echoing main hall before the explosions, and me, pausing to read some yellowed emergency exit/inspection forms in a tiny glass case on one wall.
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