In 1977, I lived and worked for two months in Israel, on Kibbutz Dafna, a small settlement in the Hula Valley in the northern Galilee. This is a lovely and lush area. Dafna is surrounded by orchards, fishponds, fields, and woodlands, and a stream called the Banyas, one of the sources of the Jordan River, runs nearby. The kibbutzniks are proud of how they turned the area, once a malarial swamp, into a fertile farmland. Mt Hermon and the Golan Heights tower above the valley.

Dafna is a border kibbutz. I could easily walk from there to the border with Lebanon, just a few kilometers away. Although I was there at a relatively peaceful time, sights and sounds of war were always present. The sound of machinegun fire was almost always present. It came from the Lebanese hills just to the north, where Druze Arabs and Christian Lebanese militia were skirmishing. Now and then, when the unrest came too close to Israel’s border, Israel responded. Mortars fired and fighter jets screamed low overhead. These are frightening sights, even when you know the firepower isn’t meant for you.

At that time, though, there also were heartening signs. I sometimes walked the three or four kilometers to the border town of Metulla, where, in those days, there was a gate in the security fence between the countries. Under an agreement between the two countries, it was then possible for Lebanese workers to come into northern Israel on daytrips to work at jobs in nearby towns. One could sit on a shady café patio across from the gate, watching the Lebanese workers pass in and out of Israel through the gate.

Watching the traffic through the gate, it was easy to see that relations were friendly between the Israeli gate guards and the Lebanese visitors. Mostly, people seemed to know each other and to greet each other by name.

It seemed to me then that ordinary Israelis were trying hard to establish peaceful relations with their neighbors. I worked at Dafna at a time when the English economy was hard-hit, and many lower-class British young people were also living as temporary workers on Israeli kibbutzim such as Dafna. They routinely used harshly racist expressions to refer to the Arab residents of Israel. But though most of the Israeli residents of Dafna had endured many years of shelling from Syrian gunposts on the Golan Heights above them, and wars with neighboring countries, I never once heard any of them use such expressions.

I imagine that it would be hard to find such signs of hope in that border region today, where fighting between Hezbollah and Israel still shows no signs of abating. Today, it would be easy to conclude that peace won’t be possible there, at least not in our lifetimes. But then, nothing ever happens quite according to our expectations. An unexpected factor emerges, something gains ground or something else loses ground, and events begin to turn in a new direction. We can all hope--for both the Israelis and the Lebanese--that the turning will be in the direction of peace, and that it will begin soon.

Mom made a wonderful discovery last week. Cleaning out her files, she found a fat packet of carbon copies of letters she'd written to family in the "Lower 48" during the 60s and 70s, the first two decades of our family's life in Alaska. Yesterday afternoon, I spent a happy couple of hours on her back patio, reading many of the letters. They brought back many of my own memories: my cheerful rivalry with R during the cross-country ski racing seasons when we competed on opposing high school teams; Dad's annual fall moose hunts; various backpacking and winter ski trips; our semi-annual trips Outside to visit family; the Matanuska Valley cabin where we often weekended; the loss of our beloved family dog, and so on.

The letters also offer glimpses into Mom's own life, concerns, and interests at that time. She worked at various editing jobs, ferried children to countless before- and after-school activities, kept us all clean, fed, and clothed, and ran the household single-handed during the long stretches while Dad was away doing fieldwork. During the same period, she also earned a teaching certificate and pursued graduate-level study in English literature. She especially enjoyed a course in math. How did she fit it all in? And she recorded some of her own memories: worrying about Dad, off hunting moose with the weather turning bad; wondering how the heck she was ever going to master the new technology of computerized document publication; watching E manning the goalpost during a hockey game as his attention drifted away from the game, bewitched by a beautiful, rising winter moon.

The constraints on Mom's time were so tight and her leisure time so infrequent that a letter typically took her a few days to complete. Most often, she snatched a few minutes in the late afternoon to write a few paragraphs, before we needed to be fed yet again and she needed to make yet another supper. How many hundreds of gallons of her trademark moose stew must she have cooked during those two decades, I wonder?

Returning home from her house later that afternoon, I stopped for a walk in the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is busy this time of year, with great blue herons stalking the marshes, frogs croaking from the ponds, cedar waxwings and warblers flitting through the trees, swallows swooping and soaring everywhere, and troops of young ducks and geese following their mothers around the ponds.

One sight might look more than a bit familiar to Mom. The refuge office building is plastered with many cliff swallow nests, all close enough to the walkways below them that it's easy to see the four or five nestlings inside each one. Those nestlings are constantly, ravenously hungry, and they vociferously let their parents know it. Each time the adult bird returns to the nest, the nestlings beg and cry to be fed, with mouths open wider than one might believe possible. For the parent swallows, life right now must seem like endless rounds of hunting, feeding, then hunting for more. But of course, those nestlings will fledge before so very long, just as my brothers and I did long ago.