Fifty days of wind.

The desert whispers here. Only, it isn't really desert. I don't know what to call it, and memories of ninth grade biomes aren't doing anything for my image of this place. It falls outside familiarity, even outside what I've seen in textbooks. Things grow out of walls here. There's a balcony outside my bedroom window, and outside it, I can watch the young olive tree in my courtyard bend itself to the wind. Air rushes through my bleached limestone corridor, cleansing it, and the slow erosion of wind and time knocks another few molecules from its contours. This is khamsin, חמסין ,שרב ,خمسين, and the migrating desert dust obscures my view of the Old City. The Dome of the Rock blurs with cloudy, gray sand, and though it's midday, the sun is gone. In my country, though, wind doesn't speak. Here, the ancient breeze murmurs Arabic and Hebrew together. For centuries, it has flowed through the lungs of Arab and Israeli citizens alike. And now it flows through mine.