The table overlooking the sea

If we felt like eating fish, we would get in the car and go to the seaside, to a small town in Tartus, Bsireh, about an hour-and-a-half drive from Homs. My grandfather has a one-bedroom vacation house, right on the beach. My mother and her siblings spent their summers there when they were young. They used to sleep on the sofas in the living room. Later on, once the grandchildren had come along, there were days when up to fifteen or twenty men would spend the night in that little house. It still only had one bedroom, so there was no place where there wasn’t someone sleeping. It was precisely this camaraderie in chaos that made the summers at my grandfather’s vacation house such an experience.