Happy New Year!  Blogging from home (near Boston) now, trying to record-before-I-forget a backlog of vignettes accumulated in Cairo.  Here’s one:

One day as I was walking home from the metro I saw a crowd of people standing around on my street. A huge tree had cracked in half and fallen, crushing several cars.

I asked the neighbors what had happened. “Oh my God, can you believe it, the tree just fell by itself, there was no storm or anything, not even a very strong wind!”

“God just willed it to fall!”

But the old lady who always sat outside her store, wearing the same kerchief and the same facial expression, showed no surprise. “That type of tree. They always crack and fall over. It’s known. That species of tree — I don’t know what it’s called. They are always like that.”
The next morning I saw two men chipping away at the huge trunk with tiny hatchets. By 5pm the whole thing was gone.