Where Joy Was Planted

Autumn in Mazandaran, Iran. Photo by Mohammad Rezaee, Fars News Agency.

For several weeks every autumn, our front yard and the blue pool in the middle of it would fill up with fallen leaves. The leaves were in so many different colors, yellow, orange, brown, and red. Our gardener, who had a name I have never heard since, Arabali, would sweep the leaves to a corner and fetch the ones in the pool, putting them in piles around the yard, until he could get a chance to collect them all and remove them. One of the funnest things my sisters and I used to do was to jump on the piles of leaves in the backyard, throwing them around and burying ourselves in them. We would leave a mess and if we were caught by my mother or Arabali himself, we had hell to pay! This never stopped us, though! That yard had so many of my childhood memories in it. From the spring roses around which we did our annual Nowruz photos, to the mulberry trees which come May would be filled with delicious fruit, to the pool which was our sanctuary during the summers, to the leaves which were our autumn joy, to the snowmen we would create during the winter, all my childhood is now planted in that yard. It's still around, you know? Well, modified and made a lot smaller, but I have gone back to see it again, and it's still there. Trees and plants have grown where those joys were planted, I know. I miss my childhood house's yard, but I am happy in the knowledge of the life that goes on in it, still.