1. The Day Begins

 Village life had its own rhythm. I loved to keep alert to every bar change and every note within each movement even up to the quarter notes. It was a symphony of which I was part. It was my village, my community, my Shemlan.

I woke up early, listening to the silence and waiting. It was dark still and bed sheets and blankets were warm under my chin all the way down to my toes. I listened a while longer and found the morning quiet inside the house and as the light began to filter into the darkness, I watched, expectant, as the light drove the darkness away.

Tantalizing noises outside beckoned me: a bird scratching on the ground near my window; our cock crowing and his hens clucking their way out of their boxes, as if to startle the day into life; a donkey braying in the fields close by with its brash baritone giving pitch to the early morning practice session, and finally, the distant bleating of the sheep as they followed the shepherd playing his twin reed pipe as he led them down the road.

The call to adventure was too strong for me to be lying in bed, so I grabbed whatever clothes were around, put them on hastily in a semblance of order and off I left to participate and join the day.

 Slipping out of the kitchen door, through the main gate and onto the curved verge of the roadway, I watched the shepherd leading his sheep down to the turn in the road and then off into the fields. After following the sheep a little way, I changed direction and turned aside up the stone-stepped pathway to the Farajallah’s house next door. There was always something going on in their home from early in the day. Today was no exception. The fragrance of roasting coffee beans pervading the area beckoned me.

The next aroma to accost my nostrils was that of yeast in dough. Preparing the bread dough was one of the first things Fawzi’s mother did early in the morning, leaving it to rise while she walked across the fields to fetch water at the ain, with her empty jarra on her head.

Im-Fawzi was quiet and deep in thought, as I followed her to the ain carrying a small breek, but as soon as she arrived there the real cacophony of talk began. The ladies had not seen each other for at least eight hours and so much had to be shared and debated that the whole purpose of going to the spring to get water seemed forgotten.

As the greetings and hubbub died down slightly, a vague queue formed, and each lady put her jarra under the spewing pipe until it was full and then moved to the side to make way for the next person. This task was efficiently accomplished while communicating incessantly with accompanying gesticulations, words, facial expressions and flashing eyes.

A small round cloth pad was placed deftly on the head and then the full jar of water hefted, with help from bystanders, onto that pad, where it was balanced for carrying. The wiggly two and three step dances the ladies did to get the balance right was often quite comical for me to watch but no one else found it in the least bit amusing. With loud goodbyes, wobbly necks and eyes going alternately upwards then downwards, the return journey began with me carrying my breek with both hands, as full of water as a breek can be, following Im-Fawzi’s footsteps on the hardened earth pathway back to her home.

By the time we got back to the downstairs section of the house, which the Farajallah’s occupied, the coffee was brewed and filled the kitchen with its rich, heady, eye-opening and taste bud stimulating aroma; the bread dough had risen sufficiently to be punched down and separated into cup-sized balls until the whole lump was used up.

The balls of dough were put into a wide round wicker basket with a rim lined with a cloth larger than the basket and huddled together so that they filled the basket about two layers deep. As we were leaving to take the basket for the bread to be baked at the village furun, I heard my name being called. Im-Fawzi shooed me off to go back home for breakfast.

Mom had cooked up our usual porridge and wanted us to sit at the table to enjoy the morning meal. We, Brenda, Graham, Howard, for whom the idea of sitting was a passing novelty, with Joan in her high chair, gathered round the table together. Dad gave thanks for the meal with a short prayer, alert even in prayer to the possible need to lunge and prevent one of us from smearing porridge over the cloth, we began the business of eating breakfast.

Milk was poured onto the porridge, a bit of sugar was added and then we mixed it all up, and used a spoon to eat. A glass of milk accompanied our meal and there was jam and marmalade on the table as well, but only Mom and Dad liked that on their bread. The meal ended with Dad saying goodbye to us and going off to his office, in another part of our big, double-story home, to prepare for lectures for the students at the Lebanon Bible Institute (LBI). The lecture room was just above his office and he got to the front of the lecture room by going up a stairwell from his office.

We helped Mom clear up the table as we were able, having negotiated beforehand the kind of help she could accept from each of us uniquely. She would then wash up, put the dishes into the rack to drain and dry before relaxing with a satisfied sigh. I hung around and made some normal observations, answered any questions and waited on tenterhooks for Mom to go down to the kitchen to speak with Selwa about catering for the day’s lunch. Once she left, I felt released to go down to the village “square” and see what was going on there.