During my North America trip in 2012, I ate blueberry bagels with cream cheese almost every day for breakfast, and sometimes for lunch too, during the periods when I wasn’t wwoofing. It became my favorite thing. Since then, though, I haven’t really had them. They aren’t a thing here, you can hardly buy them anywhere, and when I once tried to bake them myself, they only tasted like ordinary, dry home baked bread.
But now I’ve found a place that sells them. Proper blueberry bagels! I’ve been eating them for breakfast again, this time while sitting in the shade in the gazebo, reading “Great house” by Nicole Krauss. A really good book. About loss and longing. Another piece of Jewish culture. It is catching, this longing to Israel. Ever since I read a novel about a Jewish family and their citrus farm more than ten years ago, I’ve had this secret wish to go to Israel, to eat oranges and pomelos and just seep in all those millennia of history.
But I can’t want to go there now. Not with what is happening. Oh, it’s just so incomprehensible. I do the cowardly thing, and avoid thinking about it altogether.
Katja Malmborg 