Sick kids and Kalaniyot

We are on day six thousand four hundred and twenty seven of home with the kids sick. First it was Benjy, for while it was Benjy and Lev, now it is just Lev. It is starting to lose its charm. Lev is up all night every night coughing. I don't think I have ever seen him so sick and it is breaking my heart. Fever, bad cough, listless... I really thought we might have to take him to the emergency room last night. This AM Ariela took him to the doctor who said I've seen fifty kids like this today. Take him home and give him an expectorant, bring him back in a few days if he's not feeling better, which made me glad we didn't shlepp to the hospital and wait four or five hours to be told the same thing. He is asleep now and so I am writing in the little break since my brain isn't up to much more.
I went out for a walk yesterday to try to regain my sanity (I know, it would have taken more than a walk even before the last week and a half) and made it about half way to Bethlehem. I went to the outer reaches of Kibbutz Ramat Rachel. Ramat Rachel changed hands three times in the war of Independence, between the Jordanians and the Israelis. There are still trenches and bunkers cut in the rocks out there. Now it is like a funny little suburb of Jerusalem at the southernmost tip of the city and from the south eastern tip you can see Bethlehem in the West Bank. It is funny how close everything is here. I walked in the woods there. It si a beautiful pine forest. I was hoping to find old coins. My friend David told me that after a big rain is a good time to find antique coins, but I didn't see any. There is a lot of garbage out there. It seems to be a favorite dumping ground, which is kind of a shame. I saw a spot where somebody had taken maybe forty old cell-phones and smashed them, and left the cases. I guess there is some sort of cell phone chop shop type business where you take out components and resell them. At any rate I also saw a few red kalaniyot coming into flower. Kalaniyot have a sort of mythic place in Israeli history. Natan Alterman one of the most popular poets of pre-state Israel wrote a poem called Kalaniyot which became a popular song...

Night comes, the sunset burns
I dream, the visions of my eyes
A small, young girl comes
And Kalaniyot, in flame, consume the valley...
My (probably pretty poor) translation of the first few lines.

כלניות / נתן אלתרמן

הערב בא, שקיעה בהר יוקדת
אני חולמת ורואות עיני:
הגיאה נערה קטנה יורדת
ובאש כלניות לוהט הגיא.

Though the flowers come in many shades, the classic is red and the berrets of the British soldiers during the period of the British mandate were red so the soldiers became known as kalaniyot. I don't know if Alterman meant that when he wrote the poem but there is a story that members of the underground Jewish resistance/terror (take your pick) organizations the lechi and the etzel would sing the song when British soldiers came near to alert one another.
A kalanit is an anemone, anemone coronaria, which I always thought was a poppy. It looks like a poppy to me, while an anemone I think of as something much bigger and floppier, though true poppies go by the latin name papaver, so don't try cooking up opium from kalaniot, it won't do you any good.
I wonder whether the Alterman poem or the use of the name Kalaniyot generally was connected at all to the famous English poppy poem which linked soldiers and the flowers "In Flanders Fields" (written by Canadian John McCrae. Incidentally, the last verse which I either never knew or had fogotten, changes the meaning of the poem from anti war to pretty blood-thirsty
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields. A sentiment worthy of this part of the world in 2009.)

Kalaniot are native to this part of the world but I can't find them in Marcus Jastrow's dictionary of Rabbinic Hebrew nor in a search for the word in the bible so I am guessing it is a modern hebrew coinage, perhaps courtesy of Amos Oz's great uncle Joseph. People make a day of going to see the kalaniot in Israel in places where they bloom, like fire in a valley.