sabzeh ovenbird When my sister-in-law arrives for a weekend visit with my brother, she is holding a glass pie plate covered in a paper towel. “Don’t get too excited,” she warns, “It’s not dessert.” She sets it down gently on the counter top. My brother is laughing a little, in the way you might laugh if someone you love is doing something that looks a bit insane. “They’re lentils,” my sister-in-law says, sheepish, knowing she’s going to have to give a more detailed explanation. I inspect the pie plate. It does, indeed, seem to be full of lentils, beginning to sprout, everything covered in damp paper towels. My sister in law tells us that she’s sprouting them, and they need to be misted regularly, and she didn’t want to saddle a friend with the task, so she brought them along, cradling them gingerly on the ferry and in the car, like a child or a pet. She’s attached to the lentils. I can see that. I can see that they are more than seeds. Or they are the seeds of something greater than small green shoots. She explains that they are for her Haft-Seen, an altar set for Persian New Year with seven symbolic items. One of the items is “sabzeh,” sprouted wheat, lentils, or barley that represent rebirth. She says that she usually just buys some wheatgrass for her altar, but this year she wanted to grow the sprouts herself. She’s spent the last three months in a state of extreme anxiety. Her father is in Iran where phone and internet blackouts have made contact limited. She’s been closely following the small bits of news that emerge from amid the protests and bombings and the horrific killings carried out by the wounded regime. It suddenly feels necessary to engage in rituals that connect her to the beauty of her Iranian heritage. I understand this on a deep level. When Russia waged war on Ukraine I felt the same essential urge. I’ve never been to Ukraine, just as she has never been to Iran, but these are places that represent our ancestry. With the continued existence of those lands and their people under threat it feels urgent to practice the traditions that link us to our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers, our ancient histories. I have made more of an effort in the past four years to practice Ukrainian traditions, so I make Pysanky at Easter and bake Kolach at Christmas and listen to choirs singing in a language I don’t know, but feel inside myself, like a memory. On my last trip home I brought back a vyshyvanka embroidered by my Gidu’s mother fifty years ago. It is stained and discoloured but I will wear it anyway, on days of significance, when my family gathers in a way that remembers our past. And so, I understand the lentils. I understand the motivation to keep a cultural ritual alive when its origin is being reduced to rubble, the keepers of its knowledge wiped off the earth. All weekend I watch my sister-in-law mist the lentils, check on their progress, touch the emerging radicle, green embryonic roots. I don’t laugh. I don’t think she’s crazy. She’s grieving. And this is how she grows hope. 260315 what's it to you? who go blather from