Babie lato.

Babie lato(pronounced Babyeh-Lato) in Polish are the white puffs that come flying in the air in before the arrival of Summer. They are one of the signs that warmth has arrived, along with birds, and eventually the sunny days which so far have not been many here. However,what I wanted to talk about is in my mind clearly not an environmental subject, I rather call it a first time experience. This may sound ridiculous to people who live around here, and are used walking into clouds of Babie lato. Believe me, not all places have these beautiful things that come flying into rooms without invitation, and brushing our faces like a flirt with a complete stranger(On the fast sidewalk of distant modern life emotion, people tend to connect with the natural elements, animals, and coincidence more than with other people). In the picture you may be unable to guess right away what they are, but I will explain how it felt for me being inside of them.

For once these things from the kitchen window yesterday seemed like snow. The air blew them in all direction,and in corners they gathered forming white patches like clouds, and when the wind was favorable for a twister(small one off course) these white puffs twirled around in a funny little tornado. When I was a kid we went to our occupied village in south of Lebanon,whenever we could go there off course. Around the summer one of my favorite activities was finding these plants with the white cottony heads and blowing them with my breath, and seeing the puffs fly in all directions. Today as I walked through hundreds of them on a Warsaw side walk, I had a piece of childhood. The sentimentality in this story is worth telling for an obvious reason. I am enjoying in Warsaw whatever it is that has become exotic to me, certainly opposed to Beirut where the nearest so-called forests are far,and scarce enough not to carry any white puffs in the polluted city air. I leave you with a recommendation of a film by Federico Fellini called "Amarcord", and it starts with these white funny things, and in the film the kids declare that the winter is over.