Aunt Sedigeh and Uncle Abdullah now live near my parents in Southern California. Even though their condominium has only a tiny garden, they have managed to cultivate an enviable cornucopia of figs, pomegranates, sweet lemons, and herbs. My aunt is still a wonderful cook and no visit to Southern California would ever be complete without her lentil saffron rice, her eggplant stew with beef shank, or her signature oven-cooked salmon stuffed with homegrown herbs. My sweet ameh still delivers her kind compliments, but nowadays she tells me what a good mother I am, and I tell her what a compliment that is coming from her.

Uncle Abdullah is a translator, a job that allows him to surround himself with his beloved words. His passions, however, have broadened to include computers, which he discovered when he was well into his seventies. This means that whenever my husband, the software engineer, visits Southern California, he spends hours with Abdullah, trying to retrieve lost and deleted files.

“I don’t know how it happened,” my uncle always says.

My husband reminds him, “When the computer asks, ‘Are you sure you want to delete this file?,’ just say no.”

“It doesn’t ask me,” my uncle always replies. “They just disappear.”

My aunt and uncle have four sons, Muhammad, Mahmood, Mehdi, and Mehrdad, all of whom are married with children of their own. Even though my father considers all his nieces and nephews to be his own kids, he is particularly close to his sister Sedigeh’s children because they lived near us in Abadan, allowing my father the pleasure of watching his nephews grow up. He loves recounting endless stories about each one, emphasizing their unusual intelligence, wit, and charm. “We’ve already heard that one,” we tell him, but my father never hears us, for in recounting his stories, he relives the sweetest moments of his life. In return, his nephews adore him.

When my parents want to go on a great vacation, they visit Mehdi, who is a professor in Austria. “Mehdi knows how to show us a good time,” they always say. When they want any kind of medical advice, they ask Mahmood, the orthopedic surgeon— “the best surgeon ever,” according to them. When my parents want hospitality, they visit Muhammad, whose kindness and generosity remind my parents of their lives back in Abadan. And for entertainment, they always visit Mehrdad, who is their unofficial third son and the proud father of the only two redheaded members of our family. “His kids could be models,” boast my parents.