The Key

Three metallic tongues of fire protruded from his head. It was a perfect design in my eyes. The lava marks formed in its grip loop would deceive me. It looked like a black fluffy cotton around the upper part attached to the grip ring. Beside him laid a key with a four-toothed head that looked like the teeth of the city wall.

My eyes searched for the key holders. Were they also among the figures who petrified and were kept in the streets of Pompeii.?

?This is the first time I have seen keys in such elaborate designs from the Roman period.For the keys real life of wandering around frozen. The afterlife of the keys is my present.

My friends turned to the murals, plow and pendant displayed in the next hall. I was looking for clues for the key holders. In my heart I said, I will be content to find a clue about the craftsmen who cast the keys… .. after all, keys are not born in a natural birth.

I attached my notebook to the glass of the display cabinet.

I watched.

I thought.

I focused. I tried to ignore the reflection of my figure in the glass. The key is my hero now.

I drew with the sharpened pencil. I chose a pencil with a thin lead. I tried to capture the softness of the iron in the drawing.?

Thirty years have passed since my first visit to Pompeii. I left my homeland and emigrated to the Galilee. My passion for exploring locked doors in abandoned homes intensifies with each tour of a rural or urban center. Now, with my students, I am creating the map of the lost keys of the Galilee.

My students call me the closed door and the embracing keys hunter.

Thanks to my student Ulli Abda, a lecturer in Sakhnin teacher college in Israel for your insperation to the story.

Thank you Ulli's students from the early childhood faculty for your livellyhood drawings