We had nicknames for the village of Gharifeh growing up and none of them were nice. We likened my relatives to the Beverly Hillbillies (no one ever struck oil, but they carried themselves that way). We named ourselves country mice, as opposed to some cousins, who came from villages with a hair salon and a bank.

Mostly, when we say “Gharifeh” now, we mean only the piece of land at the southeast edge of the town, a mountainous farm that is lovingly and meticulously cared for by Raja, my father.

A place we love, even if we were sometimes embarrassed because no one had heard of the village attached to it.

Raja hunted here as a teen in the 1950s. In winter, once a bird was hit, it would take 30 minutes to find where it fell. He grew familiar with the land long before he was able to purchase pieces of it. While I’m more inclined to liken my father to Don Corleone, it is easy to picture him in his youth, gazing longingly at the highest peak beyond the village, visible from his terrace, dreaming of establishing his own home upon it.

Every fruit-bearing tree on the land, aside from olive, grew wild first. He grafted to his delight, making the pears and apples softer, sometimes experimenting with varieties from around the world, genetic cousins that might grow happily here. There are 1,820 crop trees, among the rocks or the terraced land, maintained or planted by Raja, along with a solar-power grid, a well and a water tank.

One side of the mountain is karst: landscape characterized by the dissolution of soluble rock, riddled with fissures, joints, and solution channels formed by rainwater slowly dissolving the rock over millions of years.

The wild Hawthorns rise from this Jurassic limestone, those slanted boulders like dragon’s jaws. Roots follow the cracks downward, sometimes for surprising distances, reaching for pockets of soil, moisture, and nutrients trapped deep in the rock.

When I spent all summer there, from June through August, I witnessed the harvest of many fruit trees, from blackberries and mulberries to figs and jujubes. Now, with less time to visit and the unpredictable rains in winter, I catch one or two fruit blooms.

Still, we have enough time for a couple dinners together—Raja, my mother, and I; to watch the sunset paint the Aleppo pine trunks. Still, I try to learn the place of each tree, to decipher the leaves. Still, my father sends me out with a woven basket to collect his exchange with nature, and it feels just like it did when I was a little girl.

Behold the fruits of summer, mostly green and immature this week:

1. Apricot — المشمش — أم حسين — Um Hussein (Hussein’s Mother) 1

   

2. Hawthorn — الزعرور

   

   

3. Fig — التين — Yellow or Red2

   

   

4. Olive — الزيتون

   

   

5. Walnut — الجوز

   

6. Apple — التفاح

   

7. Sour Orange — الليمون 3

   

8. Clementine – الكليمنتين

   

9. Plum — الخوخ

   

10. Pear — الإجاص

    

11. Carob — الخروب —4

    

    ---

    

When weather permitted, my grandmother always sat on her porch, shaded by overgrown jasmine bushes and the old stone house. She took her coffee with labneh on toast, served on plastic, floral-printed trays. She sat on a big chair, swaddled in blankets.

She dreamt of pine trees in the Metin forests—those tall and skinny ones from her youth, mounted with green clouds, raining brown needles.

Because of the dementia, she wondered where her husband had gone, and for fear of breaking her forgetful heart, we said, “In Venezuela—for work. He’s ok.” She wondered how her sisters were, but they died before her dementia, and sadly, we reported, “They’re gone, remember?”

Throughout my life, she stayed with us for months at a time in Miami, and we visited her in the mountains of Lebanon every summer. We spoke in Spanish, English, and Arabic. She used to say, “Why send Dana to school? She doesn’t want to go.” We watched Turner Classic Movies. She used to say to me, “Live your life.” However you want, being the implication.

When she said these things, I wondered how she came to think these things, but I never asked. How can she have been such a large part of my life and still be such a mystery? How can I know so little of the thoughts going through her head? The last few years, that’s what I wanted to know the most. By then, she talked less, and we enjoyed each other’s company silently, sometimes accompanied by Turkish soap operas, my mother on the couch beside us.

Sometimes, the quiet times were permeated by bursts of storytelling. That’s how I learned about her happiest years, at the boarding school in Brummana, or under the palm trees of La Isla de Margarita, where she raised my mother and uncle. She said, “Everyone was so nice, and we had such a good time.” This was in the 60s.

I like to imagine that the winter rain had already washed the dust off the mountains in Lebanon when she passed; that it had cleared a path—a shiny paved one near sparkling green bushes, wet verdant peaks, and cricket-filled forests—to her next life, to heaven, or wherever kind-hearted people go.

I couldn’t stop screaming ​”I’ve made a lot of mistakes” along with Sufjan Stevens. I cried in my car: “You came to take us, all things go,” and “all things grow,” and “all things know,” but only when it was dark outside and I was alone.

When I looked at photos of her in recent years, really the last ten years, I was heartbroken at her rapid aging; the way she became tiny, wrapped in blankets, a bird with a crooked leg.

I often wondered what her life might have looked like had she been in charge of it. I looked at the way our culture treated women and wives, and it was no wonder she fought with her husband. No wonder she had eventually suffered some kind of mental breakdown (that no one can really explain to me), and that she was subsequently medicated. I imagined the other lives she might have had, in a different time or universe.

When she was a little girl, she loved books and chocolate. Once, as she watched over her younger cousin, and he kept on asking when his parents would be home, she, utterly annoyed at his whining, dropped her book and said to him, “They’re dead.”

As a young woman, she did not want to marry. She was so different from my jiddo. She could’ve been a nun instead. Not a sheikha, because sheikhas could still marry, and they live in the middle of town, more like gossipy religious busy bees than monk-like hermits.

She had a third child who died at age twelve. The shock gave her diabetes. I imagine she would have made a happy nun, but this is a fantasy that erases our happy reality together.

When she had to leave Venezuela for good, all she kept was the photo of her and her mother by the bed. I have the photo now.

I loved my grandmother, and of course, I cried when she passed; but I just kept crying and crying, surprising myself with sobs, and it wasn’t until I sat across from another Leila, another Lebanese-Venezuelan-American, a friend with whom I could share my seemingly disparate and desperate thoughts, that I realized I was grieving for all the different Laylas: the baby in the photograph, the chocolate-lover, the maiden married off, the fan of Tolstoy, the lost mother, the grandmother who promised to take me to Miss Universe… I suppose I found that we contain multitudes, and it is impossible to know and share all of them; that stories are the only way to understand humanity; that I’ve got, perhaps, an overactive imagination; and that the best way I can honor my Layla is to live my life, however I see fit.

Alas, alas! That ever love was sin!

615 I folwed ay myn inclinacioun

I followed always my inclination

616 By vertu of my constellacioun;

By virtue of the state of the heavens at my birth;

617 That made me I koude noght withdrawe

That made me that I could not withdraw

618 My chambre of Venus from a good felawe.

My chamber of Venus from a good fellow.

619 Yet have I Martes mark upon my face,

Yet have I Mars' mark upon my face,

620 And also in another privee place.

And also in another private place.

— “Prologue of the Wife of Bath’s Tale”

Geoffrey Chaucer, 14th century1

At the start of the new year, our 24th Poet Laureate Ada Limón stood under an open-air tent on a temperate afternoon at Everglades National Park and introduced her Poetry in Parks initiative, unveiling a picnic table with a June Jordan poem.

She spoke of belonging: how we seek it in nature and how our societies or cultures often keep us from it. She spoke of how being in the wild reminds us that we belong there too, that we are part of the natural world, no matter how much human civilization convinces us we aren’t. In nature, she said, we remember that you can only belong. Then Arsimmer McCoy, the 2022 Artist in Residence in the Everglades, spoke of noise: how she was unable to handle the initial silence of the park, which revealed to her the inundation of noise we live with, and how it is a kind of violence in which our bodies are not allowed to regulate, to operate naturally. She asked herself, “Where do I fit in here? What do I have to offer nature?”

Come February, we are driving to the Keys on a Saturday, looking for a little wild. “The season” at Islamorada begins now, according to the white-haired man singing Tennessee Whiskey at the water’s edge, upstaged by a bright orange sunset. Beside him a dock stretches out towards the Cotton Key Basin, into clear shallow flats, those blue and sandy habitats. Small crowds shuffle on and off the dock over the course of the setting sun, snapping portraits and comparing the weather to wherever they’ve come from.

Day trips to the Keys have become an impromptu weekend adventure. We don’t own property or a boat. It’s usually too expensive to stay overnight, especially when booking at the eleventh hour, but the purple isle is just far enough to get away and just close enough to easily return home. This is our third visit.

In the dark we cruise the Overseas Highway and inhale deeply at glimpses down the winding, tree-arched driveways, at the LED-signaled dive bars, at the smallness of the strip malls. A friend recommends that we visit the sister-ship to Hemingway’s fishing boat, also named Pilar. It sits inside a Bass Pro Shops, between racks of spindly fishing rods, colorful sun-proof clothing, and baseball caps. The shop is large, two stories, in the style of a giant gabled adirondack lodge. We are mesmerized. It feels like Disney World for fishermen.2

Behind it, we find a marina, then a restaurant with a dock that reaches out into the night, empty and treacherously narrow without lights. It’s like a landing strip, a path surrounded by kinetic masses of blackness, leading to an expanse of thick and cold depths, so oily-dark you’re certain it will swallow you whole.

Nearby, at the land’s edge, there are two red adirondack chairs facing the darkness. To look up is to remember there is an up, a whole world, a celestial framework, a sister-mirror to the black water.

What is it about looking up at the stars that makes you remember that everything else is just a concept? Suddenly I’m not sure how I could spend my life doing anything but looking up, searching for some kind of meaning and purpose.

It is an ancient practice to interpret the movement of celestial bodies to understand the world around us. Astronomy and astrology are separated now but aren’t we always fascinated by their entanglements, historic and contemporary? The atheist little witch in me is.

I try to make sense out of what I’m seeing. Stars, small and large, perhaps a satellite here or there, patterns between them, two bright planets, and a faint wash of milky glitter behind them. I try to recognize their scientific names, to read the images, the signs, even if signs escape definite meaning and require constant qualification.

Stars have long served as signs, poetic portents or celestial messages. Sometimes they show us our past, present, and future all at once. Because to stop and stare is to recollect where you’ve been, to recognize where you are, and to reconsider where you’re going. All these verbs imply a return to: memory, cognition, consideration. The clarity that arises in star-gazing is founded in what we already know to be true and the stars help us get back to these ideas, or find them new and evolved. I’m sick of living by the signs of our artificial world, the simulacra of the TV and the news and the apps. I’m desperate to remember something, but I’m not sure what. Maybe belonging.

On February 20th, 2025, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day features an elliptical galaxy known as Messier 87.3 It is 50 million light-years away from us and it holds trillions of stars. It’s a “cosmic blow torch” in the Virgo galaxy cluster. To name these galaxies, to assign language to them, is to try and know them; to create a transcendental meaning. “Virgo” means maiden (Latin), strength (Sanskrit); it’s a constellation and a personality. It’s where Jupiter was at my birth and some say this is what makes me idealistic, expansive, optimistic. It’s what drives me to seek meaning and understanding, to find success through this drive, through transformation.

What do you think about when you look at the stars?

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A COOL READ:

Sarah M. Anderson’s Studies in Medieval Star-Gazing

+ Some stuff about design at Bass Pro Shops

A COOL THING:

Star Party in the Everglades

Astronomy Picture of the Day

I write to detangle, understand, and express that cultural hybridity. I write to figure out what drives me. In a globalized, creolized world, I believe this is an exploration of thought that many people relate to and search for.

This exploratory newsletter chronicles personal thoughts and reflections on my research, experiences, questions.

From star-gazing to reincarnation to mental health to Lebanese recipes, each newsletter is paired with a prompt for subscribers to reflect and engage.

Oftentimes, my writing leads me to interesting discoveries, so recommendations will be included when relevant (Cool reads! Cool things!).

This Substack is an experiment. I’m taking my years of experience as an educator, a writer, and an artist, and I’m running with it.

Thanks for your readership and support <3