Last Saturday, my oldest son decided we were going to make a time capsule. He had planned it originally for my birthday last October, but the celebration was supposed to take place on October 13^th, so it was just one more event that disappeared into the ether after the terrible Hamas attack a week earlier.

Now, he decided, we’d waited long enough.

No matter that an attack by Iran was already thought to be imminent, that it was likely to be worse than the April attack, and that many experts were speculating it could well lead to all-out war. And no matter, also, that it was 35 degrees Celsius (95F) outside, and we’d have to dig in the heat.

Now was the time.

He gathered us all around the table, gave us a list of questions about where we thought family members would be in 10 years, and told us to write.

For an hour and a half there was quiet as we sat around the table putting our thoughts onto paper. My mother-in-law, who was staying with us for the weekend, came downstairs puzzled by the silence. Usually when all three of my boys are together, the house is in uproar.

It was hard for me at first. The present, with all its terrible worries and anxieties about a combined Iranian, Hezbollah, Houthi, Iraqi attack seemed far too pressing to be thinking about some mythical future.

Missiles, drone attacks, shootings, stabbings – how can you think ahead when all around you is chaos and you are just waiting to be attacked?

Let the present go

But gradually, I began to let the present go and contemplate the future.

Where would my boys be? Where would they live? What would they be doing? They’d be married, most likely, there would be babies and small children. What would my husband and I be doing? Where would we be?

As I warmed to the possibilities, it dawned on me that this was the most positive and hopeful exercise that I had done since the war began last year.

In hard times, Israelis always say, “it will pass.” And suddenly as I wrote, I realized this war will pass, that this rotten period in Israeli history will end. When you are in it, it feels never ending. It feels as if there is no solution, but it will pass.

Afterwards, we put our letters into the box, with a bottle of wine that my son optimistically hoped would last 10 years underground, and went off to dig a hole in the forest near our house.

Digging in the afternoon heat was definitely harder than writing, but the boys did an incredible job with a pickaxe and spades, taking it in turns to create a hole large enough for the box, which had seemed small in the house, but now in the face of rocky ground, seemed far too big.

Afterwards, we rolled large stones onto the top in the hope that we’d be able to find it easily and know where to dig. I also scattered nasturtium seeds because these hardy flowers seem to thrive in the soil around our village.

After a morning and afternoon of not thinking about war, or imminent attacks, we got a reminder that all was not normal when my husband tried to make a GPS note of where the box was, only to discover that security forces were jamming GPS systems in the central region in an effort to make pinpoint attacks less likely.

Still, by then it seemed just another part of the process. A funny tale to tell as we dig our fourth or fifth hole looking for the box in 10 years’ time, with grandkids hopefully by our side, and thoughts of this difficult period as nothing more than memories.