Terrace Hopping

So, I’m up on the terrace catching a few mid-morning rays, semi-reclined on a deck-chair (I’m recuperating from attack of the microbes, part III), and suddenly I hear the scramble of many feet on tiles not far from our own and then moments later, six boys, ages about 12 to 15, vault themselves over the walls of the mosque and onto the neighbor’s terrace and then on to the terrace of the next neighbor. Arcing the mosque’s walls, a few of the boys pause mid-flight to regard my astonished face and then with blink-quick smiles they are off. Terrace hopping is what I’ve witnessed and it’s something we’ve been warmed about since we moved to the medina.

Because of the way the homes are built in the medina, with shared exterior walls, it’s quite easy for athletic kids to shimmy up a lamppost to a terrace and from that vantage the labyrinth of the medina sprawls before them like a giant jungle gym. And since many medina homes have open courtyards, terrace hopping is a great way to steal a look into other people’s places. While many of these rooftop jaunts are pure fun and adventure, the ease with which one can maneuver from one terrace to another is also a security risk. Hamoud has for months been enjoining us to add a layer of broken glass around our terrace’s perimeter wall to detract would-be thieves, but penitentiary chic is not the look we’re after. Good thing Hamoud’s never heard of razor wire.

Seeing the boys gliding about the medina like low-flying storks evokes a sense of nostalgia. The pack-fed naughtiness is pure teenage fun. Recalls Halloweens spent toilet papering lawns and lobbing eggs at fellow rabble-rousers. More specifically, it reminds me (and I hope a few BC readers!) of the rooftop antics we enjoyed one summer at the Parisien’s house some twenty-odd years ago. Their place was being painted by the family’s two older brothers, on whom we had big crushes, of course, and my sister and the two Parisien girls would slither up onto the roof from a bedroom window and taunt the boys, pelting them with tar shingles from the roof (which in retrospect, I really hope was being reshingled, too). From the roof, we looked down past a rolling hay field and scrubby Maine woods out to the lake beyond, where we all took sailing lessons and whose small yacht club was our hang-out, ground zero for all the summer fun. The view pretty much encompassed our world that summer, as I imagine the rooftops of Marrakech do for the band of boys I encountered this morning.

Just when the temperature is about to drive me downstairs and into the shade, I hear the telltale pounding of feet and then see the boys, their numbers swollen a little, make their return route over the mosque wall, a graceful pack of horses clearing a jump in unison. For a second, I’m half-tempted to bolt over my own terrace wall to join them.