{"id":258,"date":"2006-03-29T17:02:00","date_gmt":"2006-03-30T00:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/?p=258"},"modified":"2006-03-29T17:02:00","modified_gmt":"2006-03-30T00:02:00","slug":"ten-minutes-out-my-door","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/29\/ten-minutes-out-my-door\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten Minutes Out My Door"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t know what you see within a ten-minute walk from your door. Maybe a park, a grocery store, or a restaurant. Sometimes I miss those things. But on a day like today, I wouldn’t trade.<\/p>\n

There wasn’t much rain this winter and so a Bedouin family (extended family with brother and multiple wives and such) moved from the area around Masada this week to the valley below my office. They’ll be there for a few months and I made contact today to hopefully visit them again at sheep-shearing time.<\/p>\n

But I was just struck again that I didn’t have to get in a car or bus, but I could just walk down the hill and there they were. Not actors, and not a show. Real life. One of the wives handed us a pita right off the fire. Those are the best. The father was out tending the sheep and goats.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the wives told us which way he went but it took a while to find him. I felt like I was Joseph looking for his brothers. Shepherds keep on the move.<\/p>\n

The man has 11 kids (2 wives) and the older ones were at school. But a younger daughter seemed to know the ropes already as she moved the flock along.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n

As I walked back, I was struck by how much the hillside looked like those of Galilee. This is the same hill I see every day from my office (a 90-degree turn of my head just now will do it), but the angle and the greenness brought back memories of time up north.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n

I went with the veterinarian who lives at the moshav. He had just found out that avian bird flu was discovered in the chicken farm a couple of miles away and now his phone was ringing off the hook. Every person with a chicken in his backyard wanted to know what to do. Someone asked before about the turkeys at the neighboring community – apparently they were nearing maturity when the first incident was reported in the south a few weeks ago and so the entire batch was sold. They won’t be allowed to get a new batch for at least a few months. Our moshav is under quarantine now along with the whole region.<\/p>\n

Too bad there isn’t such a thing as a jackal flu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t know what you see within a ten-minute walk from your door. Maybe a park, a grocery store, or a restaurant. Sometimes I miss those things. But on a day like today, I wouldn’t trade. There wasn’t much rain this winter and so a Bedouin family (extended family with brother and multiple wives and\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-in-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}