We’re not close, the thicket
between us hard to cross after years
of my snide asides about her aloof Persian polish
and her opinions about my sloppy American life.
We chat about the weather in Santa Barbara,
my brother’s iffy health, her worry for the citrus trees
she had to leave behind when they moved.
I remember stories about her childhood—
the neighborhood where she lived,
its tree-lined quiet and shaded gardens
far from crowded downtown Tehran,
skyscrapers like gravestones in the smog.
Finally getting her wish to enroll at Berkeley,
alone at 17, with little English and no friends,
Stranded in the states the day of the revolution,
her father was lost without his factory. Her mother,
who had never held a job, taking in beadwork
to earn enough for them to live.
She isn’t sleeping these days.
Her older brother, still in Iran, joked to her last week
that traffic is light in Tehran now that so many people have left.
She mentions the trees she had to abandon
as if they aren’t the only ones
without protection in a world turned away
from the possibility of grace.
We’re not close. For now, we wait
within our separate lives for whatever comes
as if nothing has changed,
now that everything has changed overnight.
For nearly 30 years, Carol Boutard farmed a small piece of the Tualatin Valley with her husband, Anthony. A farming partnership and the animal life migrating through their land were the focus of her book, Each Leaf Singing, published by MoonPath Press in 2021. Carol and Anthony now live in Penn Yan near Upstate New York’s Keuka Lake. Tucked into hardwood forest, their land is often occupied by deer, fox, turkeys and magnificent native marmots.
