Family Amidst a Pandemic
Updated: Jan 3, 2021
It’s Sunday, November 15th. Belmont (the cat)is lying behind my head, waiting for me to get up and feed him. The sun has not yet started to saturate our bedroom since it is 6:30. Tim and I have decided since we are both working from home to wake up and go to bed an hour earlier than we normally would to keep a circadian rhythm with ample sunlight. Even though in Boston that might not be much, it’s the best we can do as traveling for pleasure is once again not a great option right now.
Belmont is fed, the coffee is made, my lemon water has been consumed, and my ~10 minute meditation is complete. There’s not a cloud to be seen as I walk to drop off some mail at the blue mailbox by end of the road.
Back home, I get comfy underneath a plush blanket on the couch and start Sally Field’s memoire, In Pieces. She paints a picture with her words in the first chapter about the women in her family. I find myself needing to reread paragraphs because as I am learning about Sally’s mother, grandmother and aunts, it teleports my mind to my jiddo’s kitchen and what I have imagined it looking like with my sitto and all of my mom’s aunts bustling around until late in the evening cooking. As wonderful as Sally’s memoire is, I put my kindle down to write and capture my thoughts before they slip away from me.
I never met my sitto (sitto = grandmother in Arabic, jiddo = grandfather in Arabic), but I have treasured photographs of her and have heard countless stories to get a good idea of the amazing woman she must have been. My dad would almost always say to me and my sister, “oh, if only you could have tried your sitto’s cooking…” if she was brought up in conversation. Pictured above is one of my favorite photographs of her (guessing she was about 30 years old here? I truly don’t know).
My sitto, Celia, was a force to be reckoned with as a wife and mother. Known and loved by pretty much everyone who knew her throughout her community, she raised 3 spritely kids (one being my amazing mother) and had the good fortune of being married to my jiddo, Augustine (Augie to most) — one of the funniest, most spirited men I have ever known. Pictured below is my jiddo with my mom.
Though I never met her, I can almost vividly imagine her and my mom’s aunts all in the kitchen cooking together, the same kitchen that my sister and I would sneak many almond Hershey kisses from later on when we’d go over during Summer to swim. I can hear the pans and baking sheets clinking as they make baklava, the same baklava that my mom now makes every Holiday season. It’s so good that the consistent reaction is, “oh my God, you should sell this!”. I can picture them all chatting and laughing together in her tight yet airy brown, 1960’s themed kitchen while making countless other Turkish and/or Syrian (we’re not 100% sure which it is) dishes like hashweh and others that I am not going to attempt to spell out or guess the names of.
I can practically smell the cigarette smoke (it was the 60’s) lingering amongst the Middle Eastern spices being used while food is baking or cooking on the stove. I can see them leaving the kitchen through the storm door to the back yard and walking cautiously on the deck attached to the house barefoot as to avoid getting splinters, just like my sister and I would later when we were kids (although maybe the deck was in better shape back then?). I can hear their laughter and see their hands — working hands — looking older than they were from kneading food and washing their hands so often. I can imagine my mom as a child walking into the kitchen the next morning and tiptoeing around my sitto sleeping in a chair, her head rested on her arms on the kitchen table in front of a beaded cornucopia art piece on the wall.
I imagine all of these almost like memories, given how often I have pictured them. They’re familiar — they feel like a part of me. I am not sad to have missed those moments, though I wish I could have seen them firsthand. What I am sad about though is how this year has created an undying yearning for times like those with my family now.
One of the things I love more than anything is getting people together and creating memories. I love hosting for this reason. Although I will absolutely never have the cooking skills that my mom got from my sitto (I love cleaning, not cooking. Thankfully Tim loves cooking though!), I make a mean cheese platter plate and crock pot of meatballs. But what is on my plate never matters as much to me as the people around me that I am able to indulge in conversations and laugh with.
Tim and I know too many people first hand who have come down with COVID to want to risk getting it ourselves, or potentially give it to someone else. Thus, we have remained largely at home. We go to the gym and are safely distanced from those around us for workouts, and I still work at the salon on Saturdays with a mask, gloves, and apron on all day (except for food and drink in the breakroom). We’ve had a get together with friends in our backyard, and I have had a couple friends over for an outdoor lunch on separate occasions. I have also been to my mom’s a few times, but with numbers spiking up again I won’t be going over without a mask on (for her protection too, just in case). Other than that, those have been our means of in person socialization.
This year has taught me a lot of important lessons, some that I should have known a long time ago. But one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is that our relationships with people are the most important things we have. Whether those relationships are with our direct or chosen families from friends, they’re to be treated as sacred and valued higher than anything else.
At the start of quarantine, my family and I started a family call to indulge in this and create more memories through the means of Zoom, just like many others have. My younger cousins show us their artwork, movies, and books that they’ve created (those girls are seriously TALENTED!), we talk about life in this moment, and sometimes play virtual games like GeoGuesser. Two of my cousins are teachers, so learning about their experiences this year is always interesting, to say the least. Seeing us as a group of squares on Zoom gets me picturing all of us together in person somewhere, like in my jiddo’s backyard together for a bbq and swimming on a hot Summer day.
I wonder what my sitto and my mom’s aunts would think of all of us getting together now on a Zoom call for some family time (what’d they’d think of something like Zoom is another topic). Maybe one day when COVID numbers are consistently low and we have a reliable vaccine with high success rates, we’ll be able to spend weekends together cooking, hanging out and maybe even fall asleep at the kitchen table together, too (almost all of us have napped on the couch together on different occasions. We’re a nap family). In the mean time, I’m forever thankful for modern technology to help us remain social while keeping us all safe. I bet my sitto is glad that we all have a means to carry on being there for each other in this moment, too.
Originally published at https://higginssarah12.wixsite.com on November 16, 2020.
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