Thanks, Grandpa.

June 29, 2011

                The scents of the morning drive to the tell have started to become familiar: smoke from recently burnt olive wood, the Madaba dump, the goat pen of that guy who keeps his livestock beside the shop near the speed bump, things like that.  There was a new scent this morning, slightly acidic, a familiar smell somehow, thought I couldn’t place it. As we neared the dig site and I looked up at the sky, it struck me why it seemed that way.

                Few people expect to smell rain in the desert.

                The sky was overcast, heavy clouds obscuring the sun. The smell of rain hung in the air, and the morning breeze was cooler than usual. I am firmly convinced my grandfather is to blame.

                Grandpa Jack was, it seemed, something of a stormbringer. Whether it was pure coincidence or something else, rough weather appeared to follow him when he travelled. It rained and snowed in places where it very rarely does so every time he went abroad, and he was quite the traveller in his day. I can’t recall precisely, but I don’t remember it ever being sunny when he came to visit. He died close to twenty years ago; I’d like to think this is his way of showing approval for being the first of our family to get abroad the way he did, to have an adventure and step outside that comfort zone of hearth and home and loved ones to live a little.

                At the site, we’ve been cleaning the interseasonal debris out of the square. It looks a bit like the north balk—the wall of soil left to separate one square from another—threw up into the rooms just south of it. So far, we’ve found a decent number of potsherds and bone fragments, and even a few objects. It looks like it will be an interesting square.

When cleanup was finished and the time came to begin tearing down the north balk, we got a bit of a surprise. Perhaps foolishly, we had anticipated being able to get at least a little off the top before it got overly crumbly. The balk had other ideas. 

                Tap. Taptap. Scrape scrape WHUMP.

                All hell broke loose before us as a good third of the upper part of the balk came crashing down. Our boots and sinuses were filled with dirt, but we were unharmed. Tomorrow, we’ll go back to it much more gently.