meisa's lagoon

before maman died she told me about how she was so happy i sewed because that was absolutely something that came from her.
i had come home from my first summer at william and mary with a quilt that i was working on to show off to her. i remember she was lying on the bed in our guest room because she was too weak to go up the stairs to her bedroom where she had slept for the previous five years. i think about it now and realize how lucky i was to have her living with us for so long.
it was definately an adjustment at first. to start off, we all had to get used to my grandfather and her husband no longer being around. and then there was the transition to speaking less english in the house and more pharsi since she spoke and understood very little english. i think probably one of the more difficult things for her was getting used to our dog. to her, dogs were dirty creatures that were frightening. but then, as the years passed, the two of them were the only ones in the house together during the day, and they came to be good friends. i still remember taking daisy into her room right before they took her to the hospice, so she could say goodbye.
maman was an amazing woman. i was just telling the story the other day about how she collected the cotton that came in tylenol bottles and made a pillow out of it because she didn't want to waste the cotton. or how she sewed an apron out of the bags that the rice came in. and her cooking! oh, she cooked such amazing persian food. my mouth starts to water thinking about her fesenjan. as a child, one of my favorite dishes of hers had little chunks of meat and cream and those shoestring potato things on top. she called it "be-fresto-gahn-o". it was years later before i realized that this was her own version of beef stroganoff. i still laugh thinking about it.
last nite, i was sitting in my apartment sewing something by hand, and as i always do, i snipped the thread, licked my finger, wound the thread around my finger and rolled it off, forming a knot. maman would be proud. she taught me to do that probably about 15 years ago.