You can tell about a place by the feeling you get from it, like creepy feeling places. That would be Um Lubna’s house—it has spooky and nasty-curious airs about it, like you want to go look at what’s going on inside, but that if you do a jinn might smack you, and if the jinn doesn’t get you, then your mother will.

There’s death feeling too, like too much sadness is falling out of a house and flooding the street, just to where you’re standing, which is why you run away as fast as you can before it can touch you and creep up through your toes like the worms that make Egyptian workers sick.

People give those feelings too: one look at them and you get a feeling like sadness or greatness or beauty or misery or come-sit-with-me-so-I-can-tell-you-a-great-story. We have some of everybody in those categories, though more of I’m-ready-for-dinner, and have-you-already-fed-the-chickens? and don’t-bother-me-I-have-work-to-do and don’t-forget-to-say-bismallah-ar-rahman-ar-raheem-before-you-squeeze-milk-from-the-goat’s-teat people. It’s those first ones who make the place a memory for other people.

Our village is called Nawara, which means flowers or blossoms. When you say it, Naw-waar-a, a hillside of small white wildflowers comes to mind, or the fragrant new blossoms on an orange or almond tree.

Everywhere is famous for something: political activism, delicious vegetables, ugly women. Our village is an island, famous for beautiful embroidered dresses that we call rozas while most everyone else calls them thobes, and yet surrounded by villages that do not embroider at all.

The complicated embroidery on our rozas—with both Palestinian and western stitches and patterns—captures the spirit of Nawara, which sits at the top of the West Bank, just west of the Jordan River, east of Jenin and far enough away from both of these places to be a peaceful village that only every so often releases an avalanche of stones and fire. This is something that happens more often as the Israelis take parts of our village to build their settlements.

Nawara could have a smaller version of herself in the United States, which is like an army calling all able-bodied young men away and then never returning the bodies.

You will find many women here grieving over sons and husbands who have forgotten them, or grieving over the evils that country has introduced their sons to, like drugs and drinking and loose women and gambling. My uncle Haydar lives in an American desert and stares at the sun because of the drugs he takes.