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Dear Ji,

The figs are ripening and the peahens bob and murmur down the paths of Kibbutz Ein Hanatziv, in the Beit Shean Valley of northern Israel. Once the terrible heat of the day passes, I go running and drop into the clear pool in the woods by the gate. The fresh water is like a puddle of lapis in the broad noon sun, and boys wrestle, all tangled limbs, on rafts. At night, it’s empty as a black and upturned bell. Every day passes, slow and similar as those in a sanatorium, but I know I’m leaving soon—only a few more months. Jordan breathes, hot and close, on the flank of Israel, ten kilometers from my kibbutz. I look out the bus window hungrily at the vast expanses of rock and shrub on either side and at the great striations on the mountains. With a certain degree of passion, I wait for the seats beside me to be filled by soldiers, handling their weapons half-cavalierly and listening to music that’s too loud in their earphones. They’re thin, eighteen, with M-16s, blue eyes, braces. When we stop at checkpoints, they close their eyes, fists closed somnolent and unthinking over their guns.

Memorial Day and Independence Day were strange here—they are back-to-back in Israel because the military and the country have such close and undeniable relations. People on the kibbutz, in the two ceremonies here, gave testimony about relatives who died in their twenties and thirties. At the local high school, strapping sixteen-year-olds sang songs about dead brothers and fathers. Twice on Israel’s Memorial Day, a great siren sounds and everyone is still. We stood in the kibbutz graveyard by the uniform headstones. Everyone but me was wearing mirrored sunglasses. The birds yattered wildly and launched over the fields. We read from the Bible—David’s eulogy for Saul. After all, we’re living in the shadow of Mt. Gilboa, the site of King Saul’s death in the Book of Kings. “The hind of Israel is slain on thy high places: O how the mighty are fallen!” On Independence Day, fighter jets in formation flew over Jerusalem, and coal smoke rose over the parks—meat cooking, white streamers, free entry to all museums and gardens. In the heat, everything hazes together and becomes small. The tranquil and severely ordered rows of palms stand at attention with nothing around them for kilometers. Flocks of sheep run head-to-head over the rocks. Here, I feel old, and tribal, and protective of everything around me. On the weekends, I freely go to the houses of strangers and am graciously treated. At a settlement I visited once, The Gardens of Shomron, two American immigrants I’d never met before gave me rice and soup—their children brought fruits and leaves in from the street, and named everything in Hebrew. I climb into the cars of people I have never met, moving from highway to highway with my finger out, the big sun blooming in the palms. “Le’an at rotzah?” they ask—“Where do you want?” “Le’an atah mudrach?” “Well, where are you headed?”

The bales of hay in the yellow fields seem to me eager to speak. The Arabs kneel and ease unknown buds from patches of leaves in their ragged fields as I pass them on the bus, and everyone is a little afraid. But they put out their hummus, their tehina, their tiny pieces of cucumber and tomato cut deliberately into shrapnel. They slide it out with brown arms over their counters. They sing a thousand songs, and write difficult poems. Porous bread and people selling baubles, sandals, faux-holy objects in the streets of Jerusalem; old women passing through metal detectors slowly, slowly; grass growing in the archaeological digs—and me, on the kibbutz, with the peacocks’ children, fronds and ferns in the blue water and the desert behind, barbed wire, cows, ravens, an endless suffusion of light.