It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...Jordan!

Last week on Thursday I was tutoring Lian, one of my three private students, and suddenly in the middle of our lesson on uppercase letters and the sounds they make she grabbed my arm and said, "Sarah—Look! I saw a big blue flash in the sky outside!"

Considering the fact that Lian's family lives on the hillside just above the road dividing East Jerusalem from Issaweia, the neighboring Arab village, I was concerned that this was maybe a sign of bad things but looking out the sliding glass door in the direction she was pointing I saw the same flash repeated again in silhouette against the early evening sky. An autumn lightning storm, the first of the season, had begun and a breathtaking show was unfolding in the heavens above coupled with a sonorous accompaniment of thunder shaking the ground below.

Through the rest of our lesson, all of dinner, and most of the evening the storm continued. It was not until almost bedtime when Debby and I went to the roof to survey the rain's damage to the freshly-hung laundry that the showers had stopped and the sky was clear, and as we gazed out to the east I saw a cluster of lights up high on a ridge that I had not seen before across the dust-choked skies of the desert beyond Issaweia. "What city is that?" I asked, pointing and expecting her to say it was Ramallah. "Ahh," said Debby, "That's Amman."

On a clear day some say they can see forever; on a clear night I can see Jordan from my roof.