It's All Relatives

Page 96:

"It's said that Inuits have more than twenty words for "snow." This seems logical given that the average Alaskan spends a lifetime surrounded by snow, observing details that the rest of us have never noticed."

This reminds me of Children of the River. Sundara talks about how there many specific words for different relatives, in Khmer. Her aunts and uncles on her mother's side have different names than those on her father's side. Soka calls Naro "husband" rather than by his name, and he sometimes calls Soka "Younger Sister" even though they're not actually siblings. Firoozeh, coming from Iran, also has this aspect in her culture and language. She has multiple names for one thing, whereas in English there might be only one word for it. For example, her father's brothers are her amoo, her mother's brother is her dye-yee, and her aunts' husbands are shohar khaleh or shohar ammeh. That's four different names for a person that would just be called her "uncle" in the English language.

Page 97:

"Aunt Sedigeh also had a beautiful garden full of nasturtiums, roses, snapdragons, and sweet peas, a veritable Disneyland for the olfactory sense. We went to her house for lunch every Friday; while the smells of her cooking filled the house, I would go in her garden and smell every flower over and over again. Even though I went there weekly, each visit to her garden was as exciting as the first."

This quote reminds me of a time when I experienced the same thing as Firoozeh. Whenever I went to my grandmother's we would walk down the street to see her neighbor's garden. They loved their garden, and loved even more when people went to admire it. Spanning their entire backyard, the garden was magnificent. There was a winding path leading through it so that you could see everything. They had every kind of flower you could imagine that would grow in Maine. They would work on their garden for hours everyday, making it as perfect as they could get it. I would go through the garden and smell all of the flowers; never wanting to leave.