Of Church Mice and Karl's Cousins

As construction continues in the mosque, they’ve torn out all the old rush matting, and sent the mice that lived there scurrying for new homes. If the church mouse is a fixture of English country lore, Hamoud assures us that Moroccan mosques have a similar, ah, tradition. “Take the first door on the right,” we imagine the newly homeless mice yelling to one another as they take off. And so they have, straight for our house. At first a few tell-tale signs were left on the kitchen counter next to a seriously gnawed baguette. And in a few days we were seeing mice not just at night but in broad daylight, too.



These visitors made us think of the last mouse we got close to, a rather smelly fellow named Karl. A short film I was making called for a mouse. (A man dying of cancer wanted to rid his house of mice before he died.) The scene never played well, and ended up on the editing room floor, but the mouse in question was quite real. Purchased in Los Angeles at a PetCo for $1.49, he performed his scenes admirably. After shooting, the idea was to set him free on the side of the road, but someone on the crew pointed out that he was a domesticated mouse, more used to running on his wheel than away from cats. And so Karl needed a rescue home. In Los Angeles, five minutes on the internet will bring you to a rodent rescue group, and soon Bonnie (our morally upright boom operator and animal rescuer) was driving with us to Karl’s new home. The sweetest woman imaginable opened the door to her 3-bedroom condo to reveal perhaps two hundred mice and rats in various cages large and small. She took Karl in, spent $50 or so to have him neutered so he could share a cage with Ivory, and then gave us regular emails detailing his life and companions. The last such email read, “I'm sorry to tell you that Karl passed away sometime today… I'm not sure how old he was, but too young to leave me. He had a good life. At the end he was living with 4 girls.… He was very loved!”

Six thousand miles away, Karl’s cousins have found Dar Noury a decidedly less hospitable place. Quiet as a mouse is a common expression, but not one to be applied to the noisy critters that feast at the bottom of our garbage can. Poisons, traps, and even hammers are being used to rid the place of mice, and guilt and triumph share the air whenever one is dispatched. It’s been several days since we’ve seen any signs, and we don’t know if we’ve scared them off, or if new rush matting in the mosque has made their old home a safe haven, fitting for a house of worship. As long as another mouse does not bump into my feet as I stand at the kitchen sink, I suppose I don’t really care where they’ve gone.

The King is Coming

Something was different when we woke up this morning. We’d both slept well, and struggled for a minute as we gathered ourselves for breakfast to put our finger on it. It was Sunday, and we enjoyed pancakes with Vermont maple syrup my parents had brought in December, and that soon supplanted any serious investigation. At noon, it became clear. The sound of muezzin calling people to prayer echoed far off in the medina, but the muezzin at our mosque next door was silent, and he’d been silent at 5am as well. We asked Hamoud what was going on and get went off in search of answers. A short while later he returned.

“They’re working on the mosque,” he said. In two weeks time the King is coming to pray in the mosque and they’re repairing it. It will be closed until them. As the day wore on, the silence felt even more odd. Our mosque has several muezzin, and we recognize them each by voice, if not sight. We’re so close to the mosque that we can hear the electronic hum as he turns on the microphone. We can hear him clear his throat as he prepares to speak. We can hear him sniffle or stifle a sneeze when he’s got a cold. And now radio silence. We’re so focused on our own muezzin, that we now can appreciate the tapestry of sound that floats our way from around the medina. And what else will the next two weeks bring as the King’s visit is anticipated?

Olive Branch

Back at Christmas, we hopped in the car with Sandra and went driving around looking for a Christmas tree. Not such a big thing in Marrakech, and they mostly had a sad Charlie Brown quality to them. Heading out of town on the road to Eureka, we stopped at a nursery, which, while it failed to deliver a Christmas tree taller than three feet, did have some beautiful olive trees. Which got us thinking. Why must we have a fir tree? Couldn’t we decorate an olive tree with lights and call it a Christmas tree?

We’d been wanting a tree for our courtyard for some time, and this seemed a good opportunity to get one. Olive trees are hardy, we’ve been told. They need virtually no water and can be ignored. Since we’re both missing green thumbs – in LA we managed to kill a cactus – this seemed a good option. We pondered an assortment of olive trees for a moment and deciding we could make a go of it, bought a large one and a terra cotta pot. (The terra cotta pot was cheaper than the ugly plastic alternative, quite the opposite of what you would find in the U.S..)
The next day the tree was delivered and installed. We found a string of Christmas lights. They’d been brought in by an American expat and were 110V instead of the local 220V, but we found that if we turned them on for short periods of time they wouldn’t blow out and it was, in its own way, Christmas-y. Put a brother and sister and some presents in front of it, play Handel’s Messiah, squint just so, and it wasn’t a white Christmas, but it was something.



But Christmas was months ago, and with time our hearty tree stopped looking so good. Where once people asked if it would bear fruit, they now asked if it was dying. We moved it from a shady corner to one with more light. Our Baraka birds took to plucking its dead leaves to line their nests. And all the while, the two of us wondered, what have we done wrong? How is this tree dying? We argued about water – after all, very little water is not the same as no water at all. We asked Hamoud, who shook his head at the tree, and brought round a tree man, who took one look at it and declared that our olive tree was sick with some kind of fatal bug. We asked if he could nurse it back to health and he shook his head. He told us that the tree had been sick when we’d bought it, and that a healthy tree would have sprouted several new branches by now.

The news was bad, the news was a blow: our tree must go. But the silver lining to the particular cloud gleamed bright. It wasn’t our fault. We hadn’t killed this tree. Hamoud’s tree man is going to find us a new tree, smaller, perhaps, a more modest thing, but he’s promised it will be disease free. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Guest Blog #3 - Wake Up Calls

Susan and Jim Dowe visited us for 10 days in March. Below is a guest blog from Susan as well as some photos from their visit.







When you walk from the taxi stand into the narrow little street approaching Cait's and Sam's house you're bombarded by sights and smells that are totally alien to anything you've ever experienced. Donkey carts, scooters, bicycles and swarms of dhallabah wearing people...a cacophony of sounds and dust.

Then you walk through their door into an oasis of light and air and beauty. An open courtyard with beautiful tiles, an olive tree with resident birds, an incredibly beautiful terrace overlooking the adjacent mosque. Lovely bedrooms with hand made lamps, rugs, and linens. The incredibly blue Moroccan sky overhead for most of the day.

At days end the cold creeps in a bit so after a late dinner we retire to our bedroom and close the wooden shutters against the night sky. We fall asleep to the sound of a pick up soccer game in the mosque alley. Teenagers are the same all over the globe!
Then...the wake up calls start...the fighting tom cats! They go on all night. And the rooster who crows continually all day and all night. The first call to prayer begins at 5am, a lovely melodic sound that for me is reminiscent of the loon's call on a Maine lake. A little spooky...kind of echoing. It becomes part of a waking dream. After a time you hear the sound of childrens' laughter as they go off to school. Lovely little brown skinned, curly headed darlings with their backpacks and their beautiful smiles.
Of all the sounds of Marrakech the wake up ones are the best.