The Smuggled Sapling - Atessa Anoshiravani
- Wild Writer
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
The albaloo tree nestled in my family’s backyard transforms overnight. Its dense green foliage, freshly hiding the bare branches below, is suddenly subsumed by delicate white blossoms. Within weeks, the ground around the tree will be littered with a snow of petals, and then its branches will begin to droop, weighed down by the sticky sweet of sour cherries.
Then begins the harvest: we pluck and pluck, the endless fruit filling bowl after bowl (and our stomachs, after staining our lips). The little rouge balloons appear when my nose is almost touching them, hidden deep in the branches that are only accessible once I duck into the tree’s shade. Wrapped in the albaloo, I am in a world of soft leaves, ribbed wood, and tart capsules of acidic sweetness. The cherries slip off their stems, dropping readily into my hands. I press one to my teeth, and as its skin splits, I feel as if I am being let in on a secret.
This tree was not always so fruitful. It spent years, dormant, in a cracked brown pot the size of a hamper. It moved once with my family, when we relocated six blocks to a new house. But that was not the start of its journey — that began years ago, in a different world entirely.
This albaloo tree, now nestled happily into the serpentine soils of my home in San Francisco, was seeded in a home I have never been to, but one that I smell and hear and touch daily through my relatives. Over a decade ago, a family friend of ours sewed four precious saplings into the lapel of his suit and flew them from Iran to America, where they were distributed to diaspora family. One made it into my parents’ hands.
I can’t help but think, as my tongue rolls the fruit’s flesh from its pit, that we should be somewhere else. Me, the tree, my family: on a different fault line(1) the world over, instead of here, on the fault line(2) we live atop now.
I grew up in the space between two highways, great gray beasts raised tall off the ground and constantly humming. Their smooth voices layered together like ocean waves, day and night, across San Francisco’s illusory seasons.
The sweet smell of sombol (hyacinth) blossoms saturates the air each year, supposedly at the start of spring. Really, it’s sometimes in May, sometimes in February, sometimes in March. The scent of spring often comes too early, or too late, thrown off by San Francisco’s omnipresent fog and eclectic weather. These fragrant flowers sprout from bulbs buried surreptitiously(3) by my father in the garden the year before, shooting up from their straight green stems like hot air balloons climbing to greet the sun.
It makes this place, on fire and trembling and threatened by rising seas, buried under 200 days a year of impenetrable fog, feel closer to my family’s ancestral home. The blooming sombol is an echo of a country with four vivid seasons; a home I somehow know but have never been.
On late summer nights untinged by fog, my cracked window lets the cool evening air and the highway sound of lives whizzing past into my own small life. Where, I wondered, were all of the cars going? These endless drivers might be traveling for a hospitalization, a red-eye flight, an urgent or unusual day — each flash of metal its own universe. I know the sounds of travelers well, this cascading purr of motion, always bound for something that cannot wait. I come from that kind of leaving, and now I am here in the United States, in one of the places that once was so important from far away.
In my family, the first day of spring is a day of resetting, time spent together at home, returning to the rhythms of tradition. But the highways do not understand rest. On the vernal equinox, the cement and steel tributaries inexplicably grumble on, unwavering. The fog sits low over the city. The sombol is too cold in the ground to make its entrance. The albaloo is still a sprig of dormant wood in its pot.
My grandfather never knew the sound of a highway growing up — instead, he tells the story of the days when diesel cars first came to his neighborhood in southeast Iran, long before the 1979 Revolution that forced him to uproot his young family to live in the United States. When he and his friends walked home from school, a car would drive past, kicking up golden dust from the road, and they would take off in its wake. They chased the scent of modernity: burning fuel pilfered from oil deposits millions of years old.
He grew up on a farm in the ancient desert city of Kerman. I have never been to this life of his, and will likely never have the chance. What I do know is that my grandfather spent hours every day of my childhood — even after long days working at the pharmacy — pouring Colorado River water and aching love into the fruit trees and vines that burst from slim tiled planter beds in his backyard. He nurtured them to life in the Los Angeles desert, so far from the desert farm of his home, against the odds of compacted soil, unending work days, and formidable squirrels. My grandmother filled the kitchen with the garden smell of herbs and vegetables chopped to slivers, feeding me cucumber while I swung my feet from a tall wooden chair. She salted the strips to perfection, but always with the reminder that“they will never be as good as real Persian cucumbers, from home.” Meanwhile, the Spanish tiles in the backyard glinted ceramic blue in the Southern California sun, and my grandfather moved back and forth, hose in hand, as if swimming through the honey of his childhood.
My grandmother’s radio babbled “Tehrangeles” news in a rapid river of Persian splashing against the kitchen walls, incomprehensible to me despite my conversational fluency. I caught snippets, names, places, phrases of violence and longing. But really I cared more for my grandmother’s sporadic storytelling about the gray mouse, Moosh-eh ghaveh-ee, who haunted her pantry stuffed with rose water, infinite cinnamon, and basmati rice. Moosh would pop up, wreak havoc, and seed shuddering laughter in my brother and me. Usually, though, Moosh existed as a cheeky troublemaker distracting us from the radio’s reality: protests, violence, and arrests in a place I knew through only my family’s stories, shouldered as my own.
Sometimes, my grandfather left the sliding door to the yard open, and instead of news, the twirling notes of Googoosh, singer of lush Persian lyrics, floated into the airy afternoon to feed the fruit trees. My grandmother presided over two young children, six pots of cooking feast, and her own twisting limbs, tapping and turning to the music. Behind the door of my heart, a familiar sound drifts, she’d sing. Who is there, behind the door? I see their shadow. With their key they will open the prison of my heart, sung in a voice too wistful for me to understand. I listened, rapt, imagining who was behind the door. Whose shadow was my grandmother chasing?
I think maybe I know now. But that shadow was never a person.
When cousins and aunts and friends went back to Iran, they brought back with them suitcases of home. Pistachios, somehow always better when they are from the province my grandfather grew up in. Desserts dusted in flour. Sumac, saffron. Dried herbs. Familiar to me, yet just out of reach.
As the sumptuous rhythm of Googoosh conjured an interminable ache, my grandmother conjured into being another place, across the world, in her kitchen. Splashes of spice, heaps of herbs, music, recipes, and the chef herself, all carried away from where they began across oceans and continents, in concert as if they had never left.
The key to her heart — her home.
The albaloo tree spent three years in a pot, and the days before that in a coat tens of thousands of feet above the earth. Now, it is thousands of miles from the soils where its species fed generations of families, nestled in backyards and gardens just like mine.
Somehow, this tree of ours managed to put roots down, in this foreign soil. At first, it struggled. It bore no fruit; it slumbered and hid.
Soon, however, it settled. It slid tissue into the cracked soil, and scattered its branches to the sun. It smiled down at the family doing the same below it, and gifted them puckering stonefruits to remind them of where they came from.
The summer before the third grade, when I was to finally discover the magic of division in math class, I conscripted my grandmother to spoil the secret and teach me early. We sat on the kitchen floor and she showed me how she had learned division in Iran. I do not remember now why it was different from how I was later taught in my classroom, but it was. It slotted into my brain like the smell of sombol. I’ve let it slip since. But then, at seven, my grandmother’s English script looping and strange, we filled post-its and flash cards and legal pads with division. How small, I wondered, can I split these numbers that used to be whole before they disintegrate?
In the yard, my grandfather plucked plump plums and cherries from his trees. He pitted, simmered and strained them before sun-drying the small brown rhombuses into pounds of lavashak (similar to fruit leather). Fingers sticky with their sugars, he would present his bounty and we puckered at their sour taste.
When winter came, my family would gather in my grandparents’ house, eat foods that had traveled across hemispheres, and with the taste of my grandfather’s lavashak, we could have been anywhere.
My grandmother’s Christmas Eve celebration was the Norooz gathering I never had. In late March, Iranians celebrate not only the start of spring but also renewal, a new chance. You cannot carry any grievances into the new year. You clean your house, you clear your disagreements. You start anew, and the smell of sombol and a garden in the kitchen take you home. That gathering happened on the wrong solstice in this hemisphere for my family, but our divided fractions came together, back to the whole from which we came, for a few hours anyways. Perhaps the sombol was right to bloom so unpredictably.
And so each year, on December 24th, in the sunny dead of Los Angeles winter, I was reminded of how little I knew. Could I really know a place only through the press of my grandfather’s fingers into the parched soil, the perfume of dried herbs flown across hemispheres, and the language of poetry I speak only with family?
My aunts and uncles and second cousins and great aunts painted stories of Tehran’s streets babbling constantly with the sound of water. I heard the sound of highways. They spoke of snow-capped mountains surrounding the city, and I saw the San Gabriel Mountains that appear only on smoggless LA days. They longed for bazaars (the great Iranian markets) and I imagined them as farmer’s markets sprawling to labrynthine cities. But I also was reminded of how much I did know, chattering away in a language I spoke with only blood relatives, celebrating the holidays of a faraway place with such regularity. Somehow, I felt the closest and the farthest from home at once.
Some years, the smell of spring suffuses the air in California’s December.
The albaloo tree only really started to bear its deluge of fruit at the very end of my grandmother’s life. Her cooking days were largely behind her. But sour cherries are a most rewarding fruit to have fresh. My family plucked and placed the fruit in tupperwares to drive seven hours south, so my grandparents could sample them. My mother cooked her favorite dish (that my grandmother used to make for her on special occasions) — albaloo polo, or sour cherry rice — with the rare fresh fruits, and cemented it as my favorite, too.
When my grandmother tried our albaloo, the usual refrain directed at any U.S.-sourced food of “they’re almost as good as they are back home” did not slip from her lips. It was clear now, in the last years of her life, that she would never go back to her land of dry earth and snowcapped mountains. Her roots, watered long ago on Persian land, had finally stretched beyond the pot and sunk into shallow sandy soils here. Her family, like the albaloo, grows in this earth, a new home.
(1) A slipping of the earth’s crust, the Nayband fault in Iran has potential for severe earthquakes. Foroutan, M., B. Meyer, M. Sébrier, et al. 2014. “Late Pleistocene-Holocene Right Slip Rate and Paleoseismology of the Nayband Fault, Western Margin of the Lut Block, Iran.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 119 (4): 3517–60. https://doi.org/10.1002/2013JB010746.
(2) The San Andrea Fault is one of the most active zones in the world, moving five to seven centimeters each year. American Museum of Natural History. n.d. “The San Andreas Fault Zone | AMNH.” Accessed June 2, 2026. https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/planet-earth/why-are-there-ocean-basins-continents-and-mountains/earthq uakes/the-san-andreas-fault-zone.
(3) My mother takes issue with the rather unattractive stems that stick out of the ground for the 50 weeks a year when the sombol is out of bloom.
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